Comment system changes afoot

I just found out that the Echo comment system, which I have never been keen on, has raised their annual fees by a factor of ten - from $12 a year to $120.

Sorry, but I will not be keeping Echo comments. They never did a good job on the conversion from the previous free system; the sidebar widget is not very good, and poor Ruthie is adding the titles of posts to every thread because there is no way to tell otherwise who is commenting on which post.

My Echo subscription expires towards the end of December so I will be looking at changing comment systems to another, or maybe just going back to the default Blogger system. Right now the two that people like the best are Intense Debate and Disqus. I don't know if I can run two comment systems at the same time so comments may be disrupted at times over the next few weeks.

I can save existing comments to an XML format but,to be honest, I do not see any easy way to move the old comments into any new system. Which really sucks. 66 megabytes of comments will probably be history.

I am not happy having to spend time on this.