The writing on the wall for Google+ comments

Bad news for anyone who ever used Google+ comments on their blog.

Mene, mene, tekel upharsin

Google will start deleting them on April 2 Update: or maybe February 4!. 

it will be impossible to leave a new Google+ comment after February 4—next Monday.

Here's the announcement (buried in a FAQ page, emphasis added):

Blogger and other sites may use Google+ for their commenting system. Comments on blogs may also exist as posts or comments on Google+. This feature will be removed from Blogger by Feb 4th and other sites by March 7th. All your Google+ comments on all sites will be deleted starting April 2, 2019.

You can save "all your Google+ Comments on all sites," but you cannot save all Google+ Comments on your blog. 

Rise and fall

Google+, of course, was introduced with much fanfare in 2011 and is being shut down with as little ceremony (and indeed as much mean squalor, seemingly) as possible.

During G+'s "shock and awe" phase it became possible to "connect your blog to Google+" and reap many benefits, including a much more generous photo allowance. (This has since been extended to all accounts.)

Connecting in this sense enabled Google+ comments for the blog, and for some, the advantages of these comments as a way to boost the visiblity of the blog were inducement enough.

The only obvious catch, and the thing that held me back, was that once you enabled G+ comments, only G+ accounts could comment on your blog.

That shut out a lot of people! So, many of us never drank that cup of kool-aid. 

But never at any time did people worry that these comments might someday be deleted.

Comments are an important part of blogging and my heart goes out to those who are about to lose theirs. 

I just mean that I can genuinely appreciate what that loss might mean to some bloggers. 

It's a real shame.

Regular Blogger comments

Blogger has a built-in commenting system that is sturdy and serviceable, though not very flashy. 

There is an anemic but straightforward threading feature, and there are some useful options for moderating comments (or not) or limiting access (or not). 

There are options for anonymous and signed comments, and you don't have to have a Google account to leave those, if the blog administrator has enabled them.

What now?

If I knew I was about to lose all the comments on my blog, I would save them NOW and, later, maybe find some ways to work them back into the blog.

Were there some epic online exchange in comments, maybe I could write a post about that at some point, quoting the best bits.

Then I could leave a comment on the original blog post—the one that got all the comments—linking to the post-about-the-comments, with a little teaser copy.

I'd also plan a blog post about the change for your readers—that the wonderful comments are going away, that it's not by choice, and that I hope people will leave some new comments going forward that will be a great as the old ones were.

That might not be your style, and its up to you how to deal with this. But there was life on Blogger before Google+ and it will continue, if you want it too, when Google+ is done and gone.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

― Omar Khayyám