• Jun 15 2008
  • -
    3 Minute Read

Comments Change – Using Disqus!

Just a short note to let folks know that I’ve switched my commenting system over to Disqus.

Disqus is a hosted commenting system (free) that offers a few clear benefits:

  • 2 way communication with people who comment. This is the one I care about. Very often, someone leaves an interesting comment on my blog that I want to respond to. I usually do, but it’s unlikely that that commenter will ever know about it… Disqus allows the commenter to be alerted to any replies to their comment, which can continue an interesting conversation.
  • Threaded conversation. No-brainer. No longer will I have to say “@PersonName:” to make it clear who I’m responding to.
  • Persistent reputation. The biggest problem (IMO) with conversation on the Internet is that the average Joe has trouble being polite– and some people are being impolite and just cruel. I love the idea that Disqus saves everything you say and you can vote up (and down) any comment. If Disqus gets big enough, you could imagine being able to set rules like “no comments from non-registered users who have an average comment vote of less than 1″.
  • SEO Benefit. To be fair, Disqus (right now) hurts your SEO on one front. Given that I don’t really care too much about traffic to this blog, I’m okay with that (they are working on an API version that calls the comment content with their API rather than JavaScript)… It’ll be interesting to see if there is an effect on search engine traffic. But it’s not often mentioned that Disqus drops links to your blog (and each post) on your community page (mine is at http://tonywright.disqus.com/ ), which provides some nice positive SEO juice.

Disqus offers quite a few other benefits– the above are the ones I care most about. If you have a blog, check out their tour or just take it for a spin. It’s a breeze to set up!

  • http://www.rescuetime.com webwright

    FIRST! :-P (just making sure this stuff works)

    Oh, I should also add that it allows people to edit their comments (as I'm doing right now). How many times have you commented on a blog, realized you made a grievous spelling mistake and shaken your fist at the sky?

  • http://markmaunder.com/ markm

    Interesting.

  • http://www.rescuetime.com webwright

    Oh, I forgot to mention– you can reply to the comment notification about
    the comment and it posts it automagically. Great for that “on the go”
    blogger! :-)

  • mohit

    Nice, the integration is very transparent.

  • x10

    Hey – how long have you been using this for comments?

  • http://www.rescuetime.com webwright

    It's brand-spanking new. You can set it up to only apply to future posts so
    you don't lose old comments (which is what I did). So this is literally the
    only post that has it!

  • x10

    Very cool. I might have to check it out. If I ever get people commenting on my blog. :)

  • John

    I'm thinking of using Disqus, but I'm concerned about picky things like the text wrapping, paragraph tags, line-break tags, and exactly what HTML tags are added automatically. I already learned, for example, that you can use paragraph tags in your comment, and that if you don't, Disqus just adds a bunch of “br” tags when you hit the Enter key for a new line.

    For example, in your comment above, the line-wrapping is a mess, but I'm guessing that's because you replied from your e-mail client, and Disqus isn't doing any smart “format=flowed” layout as most e-mail clients do.

    Okay — enough testing. Just one more thing, some code!


    public class Hello {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
    System.out.println("Hello, world!");
    }
    }

  • http://www.advantagesofsmoking.net/ Peter Moore

    I’ll post the same information to my blog, thanks for ideas and great article.

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  • max191

    Thanks for a great blog. I was able to get the information that I had been looking for. Thanks once again!
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  • http://www.barberbutikken.dk/ martin pihl

    Disqus offers quite a few other benefits, and it a good idea to read and learn some off this things

  • http://revitmedia.com Viral Marketing

    Excellent blog, thanks for the post!

  • tanwa
  • http://www.moviesdownloadsite.net Movie Downloads site

    Thanks for the steps . They are definitely great help to me . I need it a lot ! Thanks for sharing !

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