Whether you’re using co.mments with an account or without an account, there are certain things you’ll want to know.

Here’s the help page that explains the differences, and how to use co.mments with and without an account.

In my previous post I hinted at some potential problems. For the curious, here’s are some more details and how we got around them.

Feedback

As a user with an account, you want to tell when you’re logged in to co.mments. No rocket science. If you are logged in, co.mments will show your username at the top of the screen. The bookmarklet will also show your username, for quick visual feedback.

If you are not logged in, the bookmarklet will remind you to login. Ignore this if you don’t have an account.

The lost conversation

You’ve logged out of co.mments, or you’re using a different browser and didn’t login. You’ve just bookmarked a conversation, but it won’t be added to your account. It happens to me a lot. I can tell when it happens, the bookmarklet reminds me to login. But it’s frustrating to have to login, go back to the original page and bookmark it again.

Before allowing people to use co.mments without registration, I wanted to make sure it doesn’t annoy people who do have an account. The solution ended up being very straightforward.

When you login, co.mments automatically adds the recently bookmarked conversation to your account. It’s actually easier than it was before, when you had to login and bookmark again.

Switching

You’re using co.mments for a while and decide it’s about time to register for an account. Unfortunately, we can’t just change an anonymous account into a registered account. That will work for most people, but it could cause problems to people who share the same computer.

I decided to go with the element of least surprise. When you decide to register for an account, co.mments creates a brand new account, but offers you to start your new account with all the conversations you are currently tracking. There’s only two steps to switching:

1. Register for a new account and check the option to transfer your conversations.
2. Subscribe to your new account’s tracking feed. It’s a different feed that you’ll need to use as you add new conversations to your account.

Posted by Assaf in features on Sunday, March 19th, 2006. You can follow any responses using co.mments, leave a response, or trackback from your own site.