Comments are back on my blog: Disqus is the best!

December 7th, 2011

I had some changes in blog comments last months. I tried URLs to Twitter and Facebook. Last week I added the Facebook comment box. Today however I will go back to Disqus, a service that guarantees easy and rich blog engagement.

Reasons I got back to Disqus:

URLs to Twitter and Facebook was very limited. Why only these two networks? Why linking out of the site? One of the ideas behind blogging is interaction by sharing and discussing content, I wanted this to be brought back to this blog. Disqus is ideal meeting this purpose.
Disqus has a good spam filter
Notifications and replies via email, dashboard and wide set of features (follow users, liking, etc.)
Login with Facebook, Google, Yahoo etc, you can also post from within the comment to Twitter or Facebook.

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Ability to be more anonymous than Facebook (which only put more personal data in their new comment box release). It turns out that this is favorable as FB identity can hold people back to post comments that indeed are valuable for deepening the subject and building relationships.
No SEO problem, content gets indexed now , for example :

my comment indexed on google

Facebook has its pros and cons (see tech crunch or my blog post : in spite of the "cool feats", I am having several issues with this plugin. In v1 of the plugin comments are getting lost when using the v2 (even with "migrated=1" flag), messages are not showing up in the Moderator's panel, all together pretty annoying. I still use the plugin on other sites and it is definitely neat if conversations go back and forth between the post and FB walls of the commenters. However, Disqus has turned out to be a much more reliable service for me.

CSS: Disqus fits in seamlessly. Facebook's comment box has still a FB feel which I generally like (see other plugins on this site), but for others it is a deal-breaker. The look and feel of Disqus integrate very well into my blog!
I had some legacy comments which I could not easily fit into any new solution; re-opening Disqus makes the design feel more consistent now, and users can still reply on old comments (according to the stats, even 9 months old posts are still read daily!)