Multiple significant issues with article comments

Over the last couple weeks several huge issues have started occurring with comments under articles.

1. Comments don't load at all - you load an article, scroll to the bottom, and nothing. Comments do exist because you can see on the article thumbnail that the number of comments is >0. Refreshing does nothing. Come back later and comments might load.

2. Comments disappearing - comments that I know I had read earlier in the day are simply gone upon reloading an article. This is not due to them being deleted by mods - I've seen entire conversation strings vanish, leaving only the first couple posts of the reply chain. Something is horribly wrong here.

3. Likes disappearing. Similar to the previous issue, returning to an article later and likes have vanished on some comments. They were not "unliked" by all the people who originally liked the post, they're just gone. You can see how bugged out this is by attempting to sort comments by "Top Comments" which under normal circumstances sorts by most likes but now appears to be completely random/broken.

4. "Show More Comments" not working - some articles (most often those with 300+ comments) when you click show more comments will not show more comments. You click the button and it spins forever. Oddly, you can sometimes "go the other way" by sorting by oldest first instead of newest first, and seeing comments you couldn't see sorted the other way.

5. All of these at once - sometimes the above issues happen simultaneously.

Happens on both Firefox and Chrome.

Please investigate. Please fix. Thanks.

We use a third party for comments. We have no control over that. This is a known issue. Either they are down for some reason or you're unable to connect to them.

Sorry, there's little we can do about this.

There's actually many things you could do about this. Some examples:

1. Notify said 3rd party that their product is broken. Demand fixes to said product.

2. Replace said broken 3rd party software with that of another provider that is not broken. There are numerous options for this kind of commenting system. If you'd like I could provide a couple of them.

3. Roll your own comment software backend.

You can say "We don't want to do any of those options" but don't say there is nothing you can do. There is much you can do.

And this is a significant issue damaging the user experience on your site. Not being able to connect to Livefyre explains an article where no comments load. It does not explain any of the other issues, which seem to be database related bugs, and are almost certainly the fault of the software, not the user.

1. We've done this a bunch of times.

2. Our current provider is the best in the space

3. No comment

I understand your frustration. This is not something we're just throwing our hands up on. I just can't tell you we'll fix it immediately.

Disqus is better than Livefyre. I have never seen these problems with any site that uses it, and there are many that receive the same or more traffic/comments than Gamespot.

@Thanatos2k: I haven't noticed any of these problems and I go back to look at previous comments (based on what's been sent to my email) fairly often. I'm not saying you're wrong in any way because you do have a valid point, just that very few users might experience this, so it's probably a low priority for the Gamespot forum moderators.

At the same time, your 3 suggestions are right on point and I think the original response from the moderator, @edgework, could have been better by at least saying, "we are trying to resolve these issues", instead of, "Sorry, there's little we can do about this." and "We have no control over that."

I've noticed that my Galaxy Note 3 phone shows nothing from the comment section, but using Chrome on my PC has been very consistent for Gamespot discussion forums.