Following Phil's posting we've revised our unpaid setup so that SquawkBox.tv offers unlimited comment lengths for unpaid accounts, too! The features list has also been updated and all existing Basic accounts upgraded accordingly at 2pm GMT 19 Feb 03.

Thanks for the constructive criticism!

HaloScan – no signups since mid-December, though not yet to the "never again" stage.

backBlog and SquawkBox.tv are both interesting if you are likely to be willing to cough up some cash for the paid versions (SquawkBox limits comments for free users to 255 characters, so if you'll never pay you probably shouldn't bother).

For hosting comments for someone else, it mostly depends on what language you are comfortable with, and how many people you might host. remotedotcomments is fine for one or a very few, as long as they are all using Blogger (so they'll have unique item id numbers), but for more than just a couple I'd probably go with something intended for multiple users. For PHP there's BlogBack PHP, which is roughly the original version of BlogBack (the first remotely-hosted comment system that didn't end up going down in flames), for Perl snorComments2 (linked above) works quite well once you figure it out (I think that's Perl's official motto, isn't it?), and for ASP you should just shoot yourself now, er, I mean there's some listed in my Blogger FAQ comment entry, which is more up-to-date than the posting date would imply.

anyone know if this is possible?