Disqus

I recently added Disqus commenting to my site. Having a service manage my comments has a lot of benefits:

Functionality – Seesmic integration is pretty cool, not like I’m expecting any video comments but it’s going be be cool when that first one is made.

Ownership – not only should I own the comments on this site but the commenter should too. I’ve always liked the idea of a service that collects your comments (I had the idea well before CoComment :) ) and since Disqus is taking off it’s seems appropriate to allow my commenters to take their comments with them.

The list of ancillary features stack up, especially for the commenter.

How I’ve enbled it here at Scattered:

I’ve only enabled it for new posts and existing posts without comments, so I haven’t started over…even though I would prefer starting over.

Without Disqus allowing for importing of historical comments I’m not about to throw out years of comments. It already allows for you to export all of your site’s comments and knowing that allowed me make the move over the weekend when I enabled the service.

There are somethings I’d like to see:

FriendFeed integration. I’d love to see comments made from friendfeed show up on site’s using Disqus.

Twitter Integration. Not sure how this would work or what purpose it would serve but people like to comment on posts with Twitter and it should be shown on the post page.

Importing. Allow us to import our comments, finally. There are a few older posts I have that really need Disqus’s threading and voting features.

Blog

July 08

Comments

 

About the Author, Dan Cameron:

I'm the owner and solution engineer at Sprout Venture, a web solutions company that specializes in web development including WordPress.

I started my first blog in 2003 and transitioned to WordPress in 2004. Since moving to WordPress I've written a few plugins and themes for public consumption. Lately I'm busy engineering/building/coding and have only been able to share a few code snippets.

If you're in need of some web development, web design or custom WordPress plugins and/or themes contact me, I'll be happy to discuss it with you.

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  • It will work fine, i've integrated twitter on all of my websites as they are gracous enough to let us use their API, and discuss is awesome too
  • It seems like these days that twitter and everything else is integrated into everything. you cant go anywhere on the net without seeing something about twitter or facebook man! nice blog though
  • Ive tried Disqus, IntenseDebate, coComment and Haloscan on a couple of my blogs and whilst all were functional i found disqus to be the clear winner, not only because of its features but more because my visitors prefered it which in my opinion is most important... I think disqus has better web coverage aswell... just my research results but obviously others may have different results.
  • Disqus is the best commenting system available
  • Hello Dan, thanks for posting. I'm checking this out myself to see if it's worth having.
  • Just to say that I am very gratefull for the Google Ajax Search. Regards
  • TheOne
    Ok, thanks.
    I though you selected Disqus after comparing it with other commenting system and found it better. So I was just interested in your opinion on this.
    But I get the point.
  • One thing I forgot to mention ;-)
    With Disqus, it is possible to comment on the conversation directly on Disqus site. It might not be a problem for many site owners, but I really do not like this.
    It is not just about traffic on my site, but mainly because by not coming back to my site, people will not see last posts and other stuff on my sidebar.
  • TheOne
    Hi,

    I'm surprised there are no answer here.
    I can see some interesting point in MntRider comments, but I would have liked to have some answers/ideas from Dancamaron on it....... As a great blogger and a happy Disqus user, I'm sure his opinion would be of great value.

    Thanks
  • I'm just not interested in CoComment right now. I used it before but from I can see Disqus just has the most momentum.
  • Hi,

    Do you know that coComment offers similar features as Disqus, but also:
    - You and your commenters can own comments and track conversations not only on Disqus sites, but everywhere on the web.
    - You can import comments to your site conversations (and also export comments from conversations on your site: so you can go out later if you want)
    - Styling is much better: they offer a nice styling wizard, and you can also change the CSS.
    - Very good support. They answered all my questions very quickly and also offered me to do the changes on my blog ;-)
    - The comment ranking is very simple and straight forward.
    - It does not have Twitter integrate (shame on them ;-)), but actually they have some RSS feeds to retreive you own comments or comments on your site that can be used with external services like tweetfeed.

    - Yes, they should also think about FriendFeed aggregation. Very good point. I will drop an email to their support about this.

    I'm currently preparing a new blog and I made a comparison of Disqus, IntenseDebate, coComment and Haloscan. Disqus and coComment were in the short list. I ended up with selecting coComment because of the fact that tracking conversations was not restricted to Disqus only conversations. And I do think this is not only a good service to offer to my users, but also it can bring traffic to my blog from the bigger coComment community. I might change my mind when Disqus will have a HUGE coverage of the web conversations. But I do not see this happen soon as many bloggers will probably stick to the platform commenting system (like WP, Movabletype, blogger......).

    Just wanted to share with you my thought and investigation results on what is available now.
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