TM-Free Blogorum? A Reader Poll

If you haven't been reading our comments regularly, you may not realize just how important our commenter audience has become to the TM-Free Blog experience. Often commenters' posts add more to the discussion than does the original post!

We have been concerned for some time that our current comment system does not make this reader-to-reader communication easy. Quite the opposite!

Well, we've found a system that we are wild about. Here are a few of the advantages of this system:

• comments appear on the same page as the post
• comments are threaded, so a comment and all its replies appear together
• comments and authors are searchable
• people can easily include a photo of themselves
• you can read commenters posts from other sites within the system
• It also offers a "recent comments" widget in the side bar

Why change?

• boost our readership & commenting community — and so boost the reading experience for everyone
• add an easy-to-use forum alongside our blog page

You can flight test the new system by going to our test blog.

We'd evolve into a cross of a blog and a forum — a blogorum.

There is a downside: Reaching our old comments would be awkward. We would create a searchable database on another web page, but they would no longer appear directly on this site.

So before we do anything rash, we'd like you to vote on our options. Please let us know in the poll and/or comments below.