My DISQUS Experience and Decision

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It wasn’t that long ago that I ran a poll here on the JMG-Galleries blog to get your feedback on using DISQUS. The results are visible on the original post Poll: Should I keep using DISQUS on my Blog?

I found it really interesting that up until the last day the vote was a dead heat. I had an even number of votes for, against and “no opinion” up until the last day and then after that I received all positive comments & votes for DISQUS. This in combination with the incredible support I’ve received from DISQUS I’ve decided to keep using it on the blog. In fact I would recommend its use to other bloggers.

DISQUS is great in that it mirrors your comments and doesn’t replace the comment functionality of WordPress. This helps if you decide to stop using it… you’ll never lose your comments as they’re still stored with in your site and will appear normally after using DISQUS. It’s also cool in that you can have real-time nested conversations with out reloading the page. I’m also fond of the fact that comments are pulled in from other social media sites like Twitter and Facebook.

There are some downsides. I do find that I have to double manage spam that slips through on Wordpress and DISQUS. Fortunately its very easy to manage such situations with DISQUS. I also had an initial problem that my comments weren’t fully imported into DISQUS when I started. This was quickly remedied by DISQUS support. It would seem the number one reason people have issues with DISQUS as in not being able to comment is a result of firewall issues. I’m not sure if this is due to people accessing my site from well fortified corporate networks or personal firewall software but that does appear to impact a small minority of users. I’m working with DISQUS to narrow down the cause of this.

While I had some initial challenges, the last couple of weeks my experience has been great. If you haven’t tried DISQUS you should check it out. If DISQUS isn’t your thing I’ve heard great things about BackType as well.

Technorati Tags: DISQUS, social media