Over the last several months Cooking For Engineers has used Blogger to power it's comments. This arrangement, although convenient, has not always worked well. Routinely, the website is spammed by comment spammers, and I spend countless hours deleting posts from britney_movies telling us about her website. For that reason, I am beginning the phase-in of a new comment system.

The plan is to have all new articles using the new comment system while old articles may be phased in when I figure out a good way to do it. Older posts will continue to use Blogger's comment engine until the comments are ported over to the new system.

The new system resides on the Cooking For Engineers servers, so there should not be any more unexplained outages when readers (and I) cannot comment. If Cooking For Engineers is running, then the comment system should be up and running as well. The new comment system is also plugged into the forums, so readers can comment both from the article and from the forums themselves. In fact, when you try to post a comment to an article, it will take you to the appropriate forum thread to post your comment (and possibly log in).

Unfortunately, I was unable to tie the old/existing Invision-based forum into the website with ease, so I am making the bold/idiotic move of starting a new forum (using phpBB2). This will require new registrations for all current forum users as well as registration for anyone who wishes to post. (Registration is really, really painless.) Hopefully, the forum posters will not find this to be too great of an inconvenience and the forums will recover from this temporary hiccough. Trust me you'll like this better.

With the new forum/comment system, you'll be able to set options in the forum profile to e-mail you whenever a post has been made to a thread you are participating in. That means, readers will finally get to know when someone has responded to their questions and suggestions in each article.

New Forum Site: http://www.cookingforengineers.com/forums