I’ve switched over to Facebook’s comment system a while back. I did it for two reasons. First, offloading comments to a third party takes the load off my server. Second, I’m hoping to get some Facebook traffic juice.

The first part worked out. I disabled Drupal’s commenting system, which resulted in less cron jobs and queries to the database.

The second part hasn’t quite worked out. My Facebook referrals have mostly stayed the same. I’m also noticing less comments, which is a surprise. I figured since most people are on Facebook already, I would get more.

Overall, it’s not too bad, it does have its quirks. The comment moderation on Facebook started off well. You can hide, approve, or ban comments. That worked great since I started until the last month or so.

If you ban a user, for some reason, nothing happens on the screen. I thought it was broken until I refreshed the page, which then shows a greyed out comment. I’m not sure if this is because of all the addons I’ve installed on Firefox, but banning did work before with them.

The other more bothersome problem is that I haven’t been able to get into the moderation page. It would time out and give me an error message saying that Facebook’s fixing whatever’s broken. It’s been like that for the last two to three weeks. Today, it’s been good. Hopefully, Facebook’s engineers have finally fixed the loading issue.