Random Roles was always pretty irregular since it's largely the work of a single person (who I don't think is even on staff). But agreed otherwise.

Kinja has support for commenters running their own blogs. It's pretty half-assed but back in the day there was some OK content from unofficial Kinjas.

That's apples and oranges. Stack Exchange is narrowly focused on answering questions and Hacker News is meant for discussion of content on other sites. The AV Club is nothing like either of those.

That's unfair.

My understanding is that Proboards itself has some strict content rules limiting what's permitted to be posted, including even incidental nudity.

It's a little better. (See, there's a third better thing). Mostly because it doesn't do live updates like Disqus does.

All I'll say is I've never seen someone post a picture of a skinned cat on a comment thread here at AVC.

If Ernie's in the room with you tell him his jokes aren't landing.

I don't like that apparently Proboards has some pretty intense content moderation, though.

I think it's "Oral Germwhore".

Kinja is about as old as Disqus. The difference is that it's only used at the ex-Gawker sites and the other sites Univision bought. Disqus has more up-to-date features in general and people are much more likely to already have accounts with it.

Didn't that feature previously exist in Kinja with tags?

It will appear, but there's no second level of nesting (like I am right now), and all replies are chronological and have no indication of what comment they're replying to. So if someone responded to me, it would be indistinguishable from if they responded to you or to learningKnight.

Actually, it's Kinja that allows commenters to essentially delete any responses they don't like.

Oh, don't worry. They have a great way of dealing with that problem. Simply never ask your readers for feedback and you don't have to worry about big unruly threads!

But it doesn't prevent those commenters from continuing to bother you.

That kind of is what Kinja does, although it's specifically the comments that the article author starred or replied to.

I've been commenting on Kinja sites as long as I have on Disqus. The pros of Kinja as a commenting platform as compared to Disqus:

It's also in strict chronological order, so if I reply to bfred, and then Powerthirteen replies to bfred, and then big bada boom replies to me, the comments appear in that order with no indication of who they're replying to.

And that required the entire staff of Jezebel to essentially threaten to go on strike. Of course, that was in the Denton era.