I’m sorry if it’s too much, but you really need to know this. HaloScan is a built in commenting system that you can install it to replace your default comment system on your blog.

The reason why people using HaloScan.
If it is just a commenting system such as my default commenting system, so why should i change it to HaloScan ?

Well, on their homepage on their official site, HaloScan post this features to let you know what they offer;

Features
· Easy, two-step installation on any weblog or webpage (Actually, it’s not on any blog, you can install haloscan only if you can access and modify your blog html source. so it is not available for wordpress.com etc)
· View, edit or delete comments from the members section or the comment page (You must login to haloscan website everytime, and manage your comments there)
· Ban offensive commenters by single IP or an IP range (Well.. pretty good feature, even i don’t know if it is really useful or not)
· Customizable comment window through CSS or the HTML template editor (This feature require you to upgrade your membership, it means you need to pay some money. This is only useful if you use blogger.com. but wait, please don’t stop read here)
· Hundreds of user-submitted templates to pick from (This is definitely a good feature. You can say it is good if it is open and involves many people on it)
· Worldwide time-zone and character encoding support (hm.. have i said anything new before?)
· RSS-XML feed/syndication (Oh yes.. i have said it)
· Email notification of new comments (Am.. May i say it again?)
· And a lot more…

The lot more much or less are:
- Comment Statistics (This is a really good feature. why don’t they put this on the top list?)
- Recent Comment Widget (This is also good feature. should be on the #2 top list)
- Installation for supported blogging system (for supported only, not Any weblog or webpage)
From all of that features, I think only the comment statistic is the really useful. Even for some people they don’t need a Comment Statistic because they have already had too many Comments on their blog, but for some little blogs, it would be really useful to see how it growth.

I must be objective here, I must say that they have a really cool Comment Statistic Idea there. Did i write Comment Statistic Idea? Yes! I mean it, It’s still an Idea. Because, you can see that there is a graph showing the number of comments in a period.

Haloscan Comment System Statistic Graph
Unfortunately, I don’t use haloscan anymore, so i can’t tell you if it is monthly statistic, or it is a whole over statistic. perhaps any of you have been using haloscan for a year or more, you can capture the statistic graph and send it to me, so i can publish it here?

Now, back to the first question,
Should you use HaloScan or not? who? me? No.. I don’t use it! Not anymore.
I have listed some factors that make me think that Haloscan is not good.

Why I don’t use HaloScan?

1. Haloscan doesn’t give you a page link of where the comment came from. as an example, if you leave a comment on this post, haloscan will notify me that i received a comment. that’s is good. but unfortunately, they don’t give you the link where the comment came from, i mean, what post has been commented? on their default installation wizard for blogger, they use bloger post id as a unique id for the comment permalink. how could i know what it is? I need to know what post has been commented, and they just get me crazy to open all my post one by one just to find it out.
I really don’t have any idea why don’t they give it, it’s an easy to do actually.

2. Haloscan doesn’t give you the full content of the comment on the notify email. they give me the summary content of the comment. yes, the half part of the comment. which is to annoying, because it’s kind of they are forcing us to go to their haloscan comment page just to read the comment.
This should be easy too. but looks they need you to go to their website everyday so they can have a high traffic. uh.. evil me

3. The content of Haloscan Comments can not be indexed by Search Engine. It decreases my traffic, because comments is as important as the post content it self. it’s sad knowing that my comments is gone from Search Engine.
Just imagine this, each comment has about 10 to 30 words. so let’s flat it into 15 words each. let’s say you have total 100 comments on your blog. that means you have lost about 1500 words priceless content from search engine.

But of course it is up to you. If you think Comment Statistic rocks and you must have it on your blog, you can install it.

But Jack, I want to have a recent comment list on my sidebar.
oh.. that’s easy. All blogging system must have it as their feature. just ask help to your help support, or write your question on the comment down there, I’ll tell you how to have a recent comment.

Ok, I use Blogger, how to have a recent comments on blogger? just like Haloscan widget?
Easy. just please read it here if you want to have a recent comment list on your blogger, you can learn how to customize the result too, which you can do that on haloscan recent comment widget. You can eve have recent post for blogger to there.

Haloscan is cool, because i can have a comment form under my post with nothing to with any html code, so my readers can leave comments easier.
Well.. you don’t know yet about a blogger hack about comment under post i guess.

So.. do you still have any doubt?

No Jack, I have no doubt. I will use Haloscan on my blog. thanks for your long writing. by the way, do you have any idea how to hack my blogger so reader won’t see any popup window if they want to leave a comment?
Oh. sure. just read this post, “No popup comment window on blogger“, that will teach you how to avoid popup window on any comment system, not just Haloscan comment system, but include also blogger coment system it self.