The Facebook comment experiment seems to have proven largely unsuccessful. It was successful in one important respect: Moving comments off-blog reduced our bandwidth demands, and thus made the site much more reliable; we didn’t have any brownouts, I think, even when we got large spurts of visitors. But many readers noted various difficulties with the Facebook system (thanks again to all of you for writing!).
We’ve thus decided to try again with Disqus instead. Disqus is the system used by many sites, including Above The Law, and it seems to avoid many of the problems that bothered our readers.
Most significantly, while you’ll still need to sign on to comment, you’ll be able to do that using Disqus’s own user id system, or using Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, or OpenID. This should make it easy for you to blog either under your own name or anonymously, and without any involvement on Facebook’s part (which was a problem for many users for various reasons, including that some employers block Facebook).
Our hope is that this will work much better for our commenters. We plan to switch over tonight, and we’ll see the results in the weeks to come. Thanks for bearing with us, and thanks again for your feedback.