I haven't been following the various discussions about allowing comments on weblogs (see BurningBird for some thoughts on this) but I've decided, yet again, that it's time to ditch them in favour of something better. I've never been a user of bulletin boards and refreshing a page constantly in the hope that someone replies to your comment doesn't sound like my idea of fun. However, I am a big user of mailing lists and subscribe to about 10 core lists and up to a dozen others on the periphery of my interests. I've even been subscribed to some for over seven years (an early posting by me to the robots list). I set up a sporadic mailing list for this weblog a couple of years ago so I'm planning on putting that back in service. So, the new comment scheme will be a combination of trackback and mailing list. Use trackback when you've got something to say on your own website and the mailing list when you want to discuss a particular posting in more depth. The other benefit for me (and maybe for you??) is that removal of the Moveable Type comments system finally allows me to expunge the last of the JavaScript on this site.