Lefty news site Raw Story switched from Disqus to the inferior OpenWeb platform on Thursday, the latest in a string of political-centric sites to either depart from the Big D or quit comments altogether. The reasons why are unclear, but we can say we’ve tried commenting with OpenWeb on FoxNews’s website and really did not like it, so we’re not sure what Raw Story is thinking.

Now we’ll be the first to say Disqus’s administrative backend is complete shit, almost to the point of being useless for moderation purposes. It needs a complete top-to-bottom redesign that is nowhere in sight. Their support sucks, it takes hours to get an answer to a simple fucking question and they don’t give a shit about feedback. It’s overpriced, as we’re now paying $115/month to get a handful of extra features that should’ve been included in the $12/month basic package.

But those are our problems, not our commenters’. They are the heart and soul of our site, and though they may be significantly smaller in number than the lurkers, they are our most critical resource for story tips and feedback on our content, and the vast majority of them are kind, loving, decent folks to us and to each other. It would take nothing short of a head injury to wake up one day and think our needs would ever outweigh theirs. “Oh OpenWeb has all these cool little tabs for pinpointing aggressive language use in our community. Who cares if we piss everyone off by switching away from the system they’ve used for a decade or more to interact on our site?”

Now we’re not going to say anything more about how we feel about Raw Story – how we’ve felt about their site and content long before they switched away from Disqus – as we would like to encourage our readers to think positively when we humbly ask them to go to their still-active Disqus portal, pick a story thread from the last few days, and let a few of them know they’re welcome at National Zero. They may even find this profane rant endearing and stick around.