Migrating Comments To Disqus!

I recently wrote an article Gravatars, Wavatars, Identicons, and MonsterIDs – Identify Yourself! to beautify comments and insert avatars on your blog. Since then I have been introduced to Disqus and have migrated all my comments over to it. Read on for my experience and review of Disqus.

Disqus is a new service for blog comments. It replaces the default comments option in WordPress and takes commenting to a whole new level with even a community page which will let you “see all the conversations happening on your blog, along with your community of visitors, readers, and commenters. We have big plans for the community page, so stay tuned” as per the developers. For me the community translates into a one stop shop to spam, despam, approve, disapprove, see the number of comments and commenters, and even get the feeds! It will be interesting what the developers have in store for the community since reportedly Disqus is already on 4000+ blogs with mine being added today. The idea behind Disqus is to make conversations out of comments with the entire process being made more “interactive and manageable”. The developers state “Our distributed comment system connects readers across blog communities, while empowering publishers in promoting their content.”

A cool feature I like about Disqus is that you can edit and change the look and feel of the comments on the community page and it is instantly applied to the comments on your blog! You can choose a comment layout from Regular, Narrow, or Spacious and change it whenever it takes your fancy. Instant previews are displayed on your community page immediately to help you make an informed choice. You can also tweak it to display header background, display avatars, and even choose the size of the avatar from 24px all the way to 128px. You can decide if you want to have a threaded or a flat pattern for the comments and also choose the depth of the thread. Pagination option allows you to decide on the number of posts per page (I have gone with “show all”) or you can even turn off this option altogether. Another cool option is the sorting of the comments themselves and you can sort them by newest, oldest, best and hot. The best and hot options come into play as readers can rate the comments on the blog. This is a really cool feature to identify the serious commenters from those out for just link juice. I am sure the serious commenters will be happy with all the good ratings we can give them for leaving comments on a blog for I know from personal experience that leaving comments on blogs is not an easy job. We really have to read the blog and make sensible comments that will add value and not leave a comment just for the sake of leaving a comment and earning a link back in return. Tweak it gives the option for changing the text for the comment link from zero comments to 0 comments, 1 comment and going all the way to {num} comments. Font changes are also possible though the default option is to inherit settings from the blog itself to retain solidarity of appearance with the blog. Finally you can just go ahead and add your own CSS anywhere, but I will leave that for now since there are enough options as it is to play around with.

Disqus also comes with widgets where you can customize a widget to display the recent comments, popular threads, top commenters, or even go for a combination widget to display all 3 like I have gone with on my blog. The widget can be added to the WordPress sidebar like any other widget adding cool functionality and taking care of your top commenters list. Oh did I mention that you can also customize the widget by adding your own CSS.

There is also an “Access & Moderators” section on the community page where you can set block lists based on Username, Email or IP Address set. You can also setup word filters for spam and even add moderators. In this section you can also setup the posting privileges and setup whether comments need to be approved before they are displayed on your blog. Like I said loads of features on Disqus for you to play with and to borrow from McDonald’s i’m lovin’ it.

Any shortcomings you might wonder or ask? Well for starters Disqus wants to delete all your old comments and start over afresh and I cannot even believe this is an option. Who would want to lose all their valuable comments and commenters (now friends) they have collected over the years? The WordPress plugin for Disqus comes with 3 options namely, replace comments on all posts, replace all entries with no comments (including future posts), replace comments only on entries with closed comments. Be careful what you choose here and how you proceed since you would not want to end up losing all of your old comments. I have gone with the 2nd option namely “replace all entries with no comments (including future posts)”, which means comments on all new posts will be Disqus managed, but any new comments on old posts will be WordPress managed. This is so since I don’t have any closed comments posts or sections on my blog and Disqus does not come with the option of taking over comments from WordPress when the comments are still open. It either wants to delete them all and start over, or take over if comments are closed on the post. The safest option afforded to me was to make all new posts Disqus managed and all old posts WordPress managed so I will be leaving it at that. I did check the forums and Disqus did state that they are working on importing all WordPress managed comments over to Disqus so all comments will be Disqus managed and available on your community page, but no word on how soon this will take place. Integration of all old comments into Disqus will make a lot of people happy and should convince a lot more to move over to Disqus, but I am hoping after reading this blog entry that will be all the convincing you will need.

All the features and options available on Disqus can be achieved with WordPress plugins too, but then how many plugins one has to wonder. Disqus on the other hand affords a one stop solution to managing comments on your blog and that too very efficiently from what I have seen till now. Disqus definitely wins my vote of approval. Go ahead and check it out for yourself and I can assure you that you will not be disappointed.