---
title: "VKontakte's comments widget: half-baked again?"
author: "Stan Voo"
url: https://www.99rabbits.com/blog/vkontakte-comments-widget-half-baked-again
published: 2010-09-03
summary: "VKontakte's new comments widget went onto every product page of our store the day it came out, and came off again. Three reasons it wasn't ready."
---

# VKontakte's comments widget: half-baked again?

Only recently I wrote [about the shortcomings of the wish-list service from VKontakte](https://www.99rabbits.com/blog/vkontakte-wish-list-is-a-very-limited-service), the Russian social network, and today Pavel Durov, its founder, rolled out a new feature: the [comments widget](http://vkontakte.ru/developers.php?o=-1\&p=Comments).

In its current form, VKontakte's comments widget is a really very simple commenting form. Out of curiosity, I immediately installed it on all the product pages of [the Alisa online store](http://alisa.in.ua/). You can take a look, for example, [at this page](http://alisa.in.ua/product.htm?catalogue_id=606231\&product_id=609257): there's a test comment there.

UPD. The form has already been removed, for the reasons below.

I hope that the developers of [http://vkontakte.ru](http://vkontakte.ru/) will soon finish this tool, like the wish lists, because in its present form it isn't ready for use. And here's why:

1. There's no way (or I didn't find one) to **notify a moderator about new comments** on the site. You can hardly go through every page checking whether something has appeared.
2. There's no way (or I didn't find one) to **comment anonymously**, which seriously limits the form's use. It would be enough to add the option of leaving a comment without logging in, just giving your name and email.
3. **The user isn't warned where their comment gets broadcast.** It's automatically copied into their status and sent out to their friends' news feeds, which not everyone may like. First, users need to be warned about this, and second, given the option to turn off the broadcasting of comments in their settings.

On top of that, many sites already have commenting systems like [http://disqus.com/](http://disqus.com/), and it's not clear what to do about them. I think Disqus will sooner or later use the VKontakte API to let people log in to its system, but how long we'll wait for that, nobody knows.

I hope the VKontakte developers will gradually "polish" their features, but for now\... we wait.