When Disqus (a comment management system) launched, Mashable and Chris Brogan signed up with glowing smiles.
The features of the service looked great. Even the name was kinda catchy. I signed up, too.
2.5 months and hundreds of comments later, I think it’s safe to say that I’ve given Disqus a solid test drive.
As of today, I’ve reverted to the comment form that came with my Woo theme.
Here’s why:
1. I want full control over my content. Disqus doesn’t give me that. They’ve promised better integration between their service and Wordpress in the future. When that future arrives, I’ll reassess the situation. In the meantime, I’ve removed Disqus and am slowly working my way through the mayhem it left behind.
2. I want an escape hatch in case of system failure. Disqus doesn’t give me that. Threading–the nesting of related comments–falls apart when Disqus is experiencing server problems or if a user decides to abandon the service. Check out the comments on this post for an example of what Disqus does when you shut it off. (Disqus thanked me for leaving by installing 7 additional copies of each comment on the post.)
3. I want solid spam filtering. Disqus has a lot of work to do to bring its filter up to Akismet’s level. I turned off “reactions” weeks ago (imported comments from FriendFeed, tweets, etc) because Disqus failed to give life only to legitimate remarks. I’m not the only one with spam issues. Disqus seems to have a lot of trouble keeping spam off their very own blog.
Does this mean Disqus is wrong for you? I’m not sure. They’ve got some really nice platform integration between Twitter, Facebook, and Friendfeed that does a lot to add noise below posts that aren’t getting any legitimate action of their own. [yes, that was sarcasm] If you’re committed to producing great content that inspires your readers to join you in discussion, I think you’ll be okay without Disqus. In its current form, I think we’d all be okay without Disqus.
I’ve spoken with @Giannii from Disqus many times over the past few weeks. He’s a great guy and promises many lovely things to come from Disqus in the future.
In the meantime, Disqus has placed hundreds of spam comments on my blog that I’ll have to go through and delete manually.
In the epic words of so many with broken limbs, black eyes, and headaches: “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
What do you think? Am I whining too much? Should I quietly be grateful for the chance to try new things and chock all a service’s problems up to development issues?
This is disappointing, but good to hear at this point in time. When I finally get around to finishing my blog upgrade, I had been considering employing Disqus as the commenting engine. I’ll probably hold off on that for awhile now.
I’ve used Disqus on my Tumblr blog for months now without incident…but then again, nobody reads my Tumblr blog…so there ya go.
Thanks for the rant and the info Seth…
I think Disqus might be great in a few months once they’ve figured out all the integration problems btw. their API and Wordpress. Gianni says they’ve got some cool stuff planned so don’t write them off entirely!
IntenseDebate floats on your existing Wordpress comment system and has no Wordpress integration issues that I can find. I’d go with them if you’re looking for comments-by-email functionality.
By the time your blog goes live Disqus might have everything fixed and be perfect for your needs. We’ll have to wait and see.
Thanks AJ!
Seth,
I can completely understand your frustration and I would be upset too. As depicted in our previous conversations, we’re working to fix the above bugs and that so called future will be soon. I’ve taken note of all the points you’ve made before/now in this post and they will be fixed. I’ll email when we’ve resolved all the above.
Giannii
DISQUS
Community Manager
help@disqus.com
http://twitter.com/disqus
Thanks Gianni. You’ve been nothing short of excellent. If my tone was over-the-top, (which is probable) it’s a result of the deluge of redundant comments that flooded my blog when I turned off the plug-in. There are few things (for a blogger) quite like going through broken threads loaded with multiple copies of the same comments.
I appreciate your quick response and hope those who have had good results with Disqus won’t take this as a reason to leave.
Here’s to a bright future!
Thanks Seth for the feedback. We are just setting up our corporate WP Blog and have always planned on using Disqus. We have a bit of time, so I hold hope that Giannii will keep his promises above. That being said, better start looking into a plan B just in case
A combination of plug-ins or Intensedebate (Full WP integration) might do the trick for you.
Always good to have a plan B! =)
Get yourself a Gravatar!
Like I said when you got Disqus – I don’t like it. Too complex with all this login with Twitter, Facebook, and everything else. It felt like a big, heavy machine was on the post pages. Not sure why, it just did.
Just give me simple Wordpress default comments where you have to fill out your name and I’m fine.
Plus Wordpress comments take less time to load and are MUCH cleaner looking on the page.
Hi Matt,
I’m always up for new stuff. Disqus also does a good job of pulling comments back into real-time streams. (although resulting traffic is typically very low.)
I definitely agree with you on the looks. Weird to be back. =)
Ah, the old “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” scenario. I played with Disqus quite a bit last year and it didn’t work out. They came up with new features, I went back and had a look. And, so far, it’s worked a charm.
Yep, there were some issues with the reactions (love the non-related stuff), but they seem to have that under far better control, which makes me think a lot of it was down to Twitter’s ever-reliable API.
(And as far as noise goes to boost a blog’s comments, they’re a lot less intrusive than Twitbacks or Chat Catcher which adds to the comment count, yet aren’t really comments).
I’ll stay with Disqus – I think the positives far outweigh any negatives (the option to tweet a reply to someone’s comment is great at extending the conversation). And to be honest, I integrate Akismet with WP-Spam and Disqus and I very rarely see anything get through.
Cheers!
You “integrate” Akismet…how are you doing that? From what I’ve observed, Disqus has a setting to let you place a copy of each comment on WP but there’s no integration between the filter you run on your blog and the one Disqus uses.
There’s a trade-off between “extending the conversation” and having control over your content. For now, I’m giving up the extension because it’s just not worth the cost.
Thanks Danny!
I just keep Akismet switched on, so I guess it’s less “integration” as it is extra cover. That catches any spam that Disqus has missed. Even with Disqus, you still have control – I transferred my blacklist and whitelist info from WordPress to the Disqus Permissions panel. And obviously you don’t need to have Reactions, or Trackbacks, or Twitter/Facebook/OpenID login, etc, switched on.
One quick thing as well – I had to check back in on this post as there’s no “subscribe to comments” option apart from the option at the top, but that’s for all comments as opposed to individual posts. It’s another reason I like Disqus (or IntenseDebate).
I also keep Akismet on it does catch osme spams. Disqus has been really good for me.
Danny, if I thought people would actually subscribe to comments, I’d install the plug-in to let them do so. As it is, it’s great that you’ve had such a great experience with Disqus. I might be a fan of the service in the future. But for now? Not really. You don’t actually have control. Disqus doesn’t check with your blog before posting comments. It simply posts them. Disqus doesn’t recognize any of your WP discussion settings. You have to make do with what they offer through their API.
And when their server has problems? Your comments crash. Disqus lobbing hundreds of redundant comments at my blog when I left says it all, doesn’t it? It was fun. I’m done.
I can’t believe how badly those Disqus people perform. You should ask for your money back.
There’s no charge to use Disqus at this stage. The fact that it’s free, I think, doesn’t limit my right to comment on its function or lack thereof. yeah?
I have been using disqus for a couple of months and I’m very happy with it. Problem is, I don’t get enough comments on my site to get a real test drive going. The ones I have seen seem to be legit comments, but they lead to strange sites. so far I like that it can link with facebook and twitter. Also many of the sites I go to use it so its easy to have just one user name. If disqus doesn’t fix the problem in the coming months, what other alternatives are there. I am very new to the blogging world just so you know.
Hi Ehab,
If you want to use a comment management system for the reply by email & extra notifications, Intensedebate is fully integrated with Wordpress. I’ve also heard some cool things about Echo and Commentluv but haven’t had the chance to try either.
Best!
FYI, if you use the Disqus plugin, it imports your Disqus comments back into Wordpress, so you still have a failsafe for content. (This was one of my concerns originally as well.)
I just switched in Oct, and have been pretty happy. My notes are here if you’re interested:
http://www.snipe.net/2009/10/trying-out-disqus/
Bummer. I forgot to click the “notify me of followup” box, and I don’t have the option to be notified if I’m not posting something – so, you can delete this comment if you want, I’m just subscribing to followups.