As I’m sure you’re aware, on our busier days we’ve had trou­ble keep­ing up with the traf­fic and Log­a­rchism bogs down and starts giv­ing you error mes­sages. We’ve been look­ing for a usable solu­tion to this prob­lem, and found some­thing we expect to improve your over­all expe­ri­ence at Log­a­rchism.

You may have noticed things chang­ing over the past few days. It’s been a lot of behind-​​the-​​scenes prepa­ra­tion for our capac­ity solu­tion. Late tonight, we will enable a new com­ment­ing engine, called Dis­qus (pro­nounced “dis­cuss”), at Log­a­rchism. Here’s some of what you can expect to see.

First, the good stuff. You won’t have to change any­thing about how you access Log­a­rchism. Your exist­ing user­names and pass­words remain, as should your cus­tom avatars, if you have them. Com­ments will appear on an arti­cle in real­time, with­out you hav­ing to refresh the page. This will be espe­cially ben­e­fi­cial on nights like the debates and elec­tion day, when com­ments will be com­ing thick and fast from many of you at once. And, because our com­ments engine will be offloaded onto another set of servers, we should have plenty of capac­ity to han­dle the discussions.

There are two down­sides to this ser­vice. One is that they do not have a graph­i­cal com­ment edi­tor, so you’ll have to hand code your HTML for things like bold, italic, block­quotes, and links. For those of you hav­ing trou­ble with HTML cod­ing, there are plenty of peo­ple here who will be happy to teach you how to do it. The other down­side is some­what minor in the long run, but a tem­po­rary annoy­ance nonethe­less. For up to 24 hours, the com­ment archive will be unavail­able as Dis­qus loads the nearly 40,000 com­ments in our archive onto their servers.

We’re rolling Dis­qus out tonight in order to give us time to work out some of the (inevitable) bugs on Mon­day and Tues­day, in prepa­ra­tion for the first Pres­i­den­tial debate on Wednes­day. If you run into any issues, please send them to us using the Con­tact Us button.

We’re excited about this improve­ment, and expect it to lead to a bet­ter expe­ri­ence for you, our loyal readers.