The readers have spoken. Two weeks ago, World Soccer Talk launched a new commenting system to replace the previous one. Despite the commenting system (Matchchat) having a number of cutting edge features, we’ve decided to revert back to the previous system due to unanimous feedback from the readers.

The reason World Soccer Talk moved to Matchchat in the first place was to add functionality that the old system didn’t have — such as reducing spam, allowing users to show off the team they supported, reducing the amount of trolls, allowing infinite number of replies to a single comment, etc.

While Matchchat significantly simplified the amount of time I moderate the comments section each day (removing spam, blocking trolls and censoring profanity — in itself, that’s literally a part-time job), the new commenting system failed to take off as well as I thought it would.

Unfortunately the 400+ comments that were posted in the past two weeks via Matchchat have disappeared into Cyberspace, so we’ll need to pick up from where we were two weeks ago (hence why some of the articles have zero comments right now).

It’s important that World Soccer Talk continues to listen to its readers, as we’ve done for the past eight years. We’ve got several very exciting announcements to make in the coming weeks, so we want to ensure that the heart of World Soccer Talk remains strong as ever — which is you, the readers, participating in the commenting sections.

I hope you appreciate the decision for us to revert back to the old commenting system. It’s going to take a lot more work on my part instead of Matchchat, but I honestly hope you’ll embrace the change and return to commenting as often (or more) than you did before.

Two other quick announcements: 1) The ‘latest comments’ widget has returned to the right sidebar, so you can see the latest comments across the site. And 2) Watch out for World Soccer Talk Forums coming soon, where we’ll be adding a message board to the site to encourage readers to start up their own conversations, and to join in other interesting topics.