Comments on: Let’s Discuss Disqus

By: AC

AC — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

No to mention that seesmic + commentag is a good combination

By: Rachel Luxemburg

Rachel Luxemburg — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re self-hosting, I have a lot of trouble seeing why you would want to tear out your existing comment system in favor of a 3rd party service. If you don’t like your existing comment system, you have full control and can tailor the system more to your liking in a number of different ways.

Now, if you’re on a hosted blog platform and are frustrated with the limitations of the built-in comment system, then it might make more sense.

By: centernetworks

centernetworks — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I agree Rachel – the pros have to be very strong to switch.

By: Micah Baldwin

Micah Baldwin — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Its interesting that there are two things that people are not discussing in the comment replacement debate:

1) The lack of trackbacks/pingbacks displayed; and
2) The inability to search through those comments.

These two reasons are why I havent installed either for long. I like to have a list of the people that have linked to my posts, and there is so much rich content in the comments that is hard to extract.

disclaimer: I do work at Lijit [http://www.lijit.com] and that might just be a foreshadowing of a soon to be released feature… ;)

By: Michael Cohn

Michael Cohn — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’m with Mitch on this. Lack of trackbacks/pingbacks and search accessibility are deal-breakers for me. Face it, a lot of the best quality comments are going to come from people who are savvy enough to care about those things, and bloggers who know that won’t want to alienate their colleagues.

By: Sean Reiser

Sean Reiser — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

1) You can export your blog’s comments from Disqus (I just did this). They provide either an XML, RSS or JSON interface to your blog’s comments. I’ll post code sometime tomorrow, once I clean it up.

2) Search Engines not indexing comments might be a good thing, as far as I’m concerned. They’ll be less incentive for spamers to code spambots to hit sites w/ disqus since there’s no google juice in it.

By: Roald Cyberath

Roald Cyberath — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

The concern of having the comments off-site is alleviated by this other player in the “commentosphere” : Commentag.com.
It’s a Wordpress plugin (others coming) that *leaves* your comments on your setup, but add tagging of comments, useful to get a general idea in a glance.
Granted, it’s a tad different, and not really competing with Disqus. But it also brings something you don’t have on current blogs.

By: Adam Benayoun

Adam Benayoun — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Excellent post.

As you said disqus is sitting on a gold mine.
I wouldn’t chose disqus because I’d like to sit on that mine myself and not outsource the most important part of the article “the discussion”.

ps: please *fix* that website url text field in the comment form (require http://), that really annoy me I need 2 attempts to post a comment :)

pss: Now It is my 3rd attempt since your nice blog has randomly selected me to participate in a *CAPTCHA contest*…

By: centernetworks

centernetworks — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

until i can figure out how to fix that url box, i added a note adam- it should help you make sure you enter the http:// part :)