I turned off a feature in the comments that would have allowed near-real-time updates from within the comment system. It would have been cool to turn it into a sort-of chat board, but this blog doesn't have enough members in the commenting community to make it worthwhile, and by turning it off the comment threads are now top-down chronologically.
You can create a profile, upload an avatar, and have people see all of your comment history, which is nice. Still seems a little screwy; I created an avatar but not all new comments had it.
You can click on "Like" and tell people that you liked another's comment.
Internally, it tells me not only how many people commented but also how many people read the comments (in total, not on a post-by-post basis.) It was higher than I thought but I don't know how they calculate it; whether one person who reads every comment might skew the numbers or not.
I can configure the comments to pop-up, to be in a new window/tab or to be integrated with the blog. Integrating it with the blog added too much time to my already long page load time, and I think I like pop-up better than a new window.
Somehow I can change the colors but it is not my top priority now; I'd have to do some CSS stuff.
