Because of Covid-19, the design college I teach at had to transition to online / remote learning one week before finals. Usually, our last day we have a 'critique' of each students final project. This was hard to do for us as the school was still implementing their online solution. Their priorities were in getting the next semester ready to go. We were to manage, mostly on our own, for the colleges last week of the semester.

My solution was to build a website - everyone submitted their work. They posted comments about their own efforts, as did I. I used the Comment stack to allow the students to comment on everyone's work as they saw fit. I'm relatively inexperienced with Rapidweaver (just a few sites under my belt) and it was my first time using the CommentsStack. A quick scan of the directions and the stack was implemented without a hitch. As a design professional, I'm pretty sensitive to 'ugly' and I'm sometimes disappointed when a stack doesn't have the settings I need to fully implement the design elements I'm after. With this stack, I was able to control everything I wanted. While I didn't need assistance, Will is one of the handful of developers who go above and beyond when it comes to support. That, plus the depth of quality in his work is what keeps his products a predominant part of my workflow.

I create course websites. As such I need to use the ability for students to make comments as part of online discussions. I used Disqus at one point as it allowed for a free SSO (single-sign on) solution that worked well with Sitelok (for protecting privacy). However, about 3 years ago Disqus changed their policy and now charge $199 a month for SSO capability!

Obviously I needed another solution. Comments is perfect! It works seamlessly with Sitelok. It stores all comments as a simple text file on my server that I can download and use. It's easy to implement. It includes several important options I use: reverse-ordering of comments (newest comment at bottom), convert URLs to hyperlinks, and much more. The look and feel of the comments is great, and with some simple CSS you can customize the look even more.

If you need a commenting or discussion option for your site then Will's Comments stack is a great way to go!