Users confusing feedback with comments

I would recommend putting the feedback page widget in a help section on your site, or doing a custom style for the activator tab in your footer (make it look like a regular link) and give it a label like "Site Feedback" or "Contact us".

Something to keep in mind... Your users won't even see that they can post a comment in the proper way until they scroll all of the way past the other comments. Your users aren't even getting the chance to see the proper route, I would imagine.

I think it's important that you make the call to action for posting comment much stronger than the feedback tab. Which could either mean playing down the tab, or playing up the comments, or a mixture of both.

This is definitely one of the reasons that personally I'm not a big fan of the feedback tab... the context can be very ambiguous.

Thanks for the report, and I hope that helps,
Scott

Good points, Mike. Another example of this occurs with blogs who use us, which I don't necessarily recommend. As Scott notes, the context can get lost if it's on the main page. Perhaps the rule of thumb might be: If users of your site have the option of sending you something else on a particular page, then then maybe the Feedback Widget doesn't belong. Just thinking out loud.