Site News: New comment system and message board

The classic "Schembechler stripes". Pretty much our unofficial logo.

Now that the season is two weeks in an things are going somewhat as expected, I thought it would be a good idea to update you on what's been going on around here lately.

New comment system
Gone is the old blogger comment box at bottom of each post. Nothing was particularly wrong with Blogger's commenting system, they've made some improvements over the years, but it just isn't great.

So we've integrated Facebook Comments into our blog. This app allows us far more reach and moderation with comments on each post that appears on this site. Old existing comments aren't erased, they're just hidden and turned off. From now on, Facebook Comments will handle all of that.

Now as far as how visible you choose your comment to be, that's up to you. Any comment will obviously appear on this site on the page of the post you commented on, however, you can choose to post your comment to Facebook as well. Doing so will make your comment visible to people who follow you on Facebook, thus possibly generating more interaction from people you know and getting a better discussion going.

Message board
Well, I think this is probably the third iteration of the message board on this site. I've tried many different ways to make a message board work here, and for many reasons it's just never taken off.

However, I'm going to die trying. We've created a Google group and integrated that group's iframe into a page on this site. Simple, clean, no fuss. It just works. And it has wonderful custom permalinks for every post.

I've always wanted to have a bustling message board where fans interact and post content of their own. Will this turn into that? Time will tell. It's off to a slow start. But I have faith that this is the little message board that could.

This will probably be an ongoing effort, but I'll keep trying to find ways to make the board better integrated into the site. If you have any tips or suggestions, I'm all ears.

Etc
Other than those two big items, everything else is business as usual. Recruiting news always slows down during the season, but content has been flowing nicely thanks the hard work of Daniel Winslow (@dwinslow09) who has been rocking it for the last few months here.