Disqus - After 5 Days on Disqus, I’m Turning Back to Wordpress Comments | Hacker News Reader

Disqus - After 5 Days on Disqus, I’m Turning Back to Wordpress Comments

ryanspoon.com

29 pointsberecruited17 comments

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I'm wrestling with this same problem.

Killer Disqus Features:

* Ability to reply to a comment via e-mail (awesome!)

* Automatic notification when a reply is made to your comment

* Rating comments

* Threaded

Deal Breakers:

* Done completely in Javascript. Sure this sucks for SEO, but for usability this just isn't acceptable. Users without Javascript don't see comments? I'm not OK with that.

* Comments hosted off site: I'm not hosting the comments. This may not seem like a big issue but it is.

Disqus looks great and I'll try it in the future if they ever get these problems ironed out.

In the meantime I am satisfied using WordPress plugins (or making my own) to get disqus-like comments working.

"I'm not hosting the comments"

This is my main reason for not using Disqus. I don't want to lose comments is Disqus folds or gets bought by someone evil, I want easy and complete backups and restores, etc. Right now, my blog is my biggest time investment outside of my kids, and I'm leery of losing some control.

Your kids will turn 18 soon ;)

Yeah, only 17 yrs, 11 months left for the younger one :)

Hey Disqus-- what if you released a Wordpress plugin version of Disqus that used, say, web services to pull the content from disqus and serve it directly from the blog host? Solves the SEO problem and the JS problem.

For the "data security" problem, you could store a local copy of all the comments at the blog hosts, and a migration tool to port them back to wordpress native comments if someone leaves the service.

@Joshwa - terrific idea. I'd use that.

Did you prefix your comment with "@Joshwa" as a clever way of pointing out that some people don't care if the comments are threaded, when the comment count is low?

Something like this would definitely make me move towards using Disqus.

Two other (smaller) problems I see:

Disqus doesn't use my registration system. Currently I have bbPress and Wordpress using the same registration system.

This makes it convenient for users to contribute to comments and the forum--because they automatically have an account at both places.

Using Disqus would change this. I don't see an easy solution here--and this isn't a problem for most people.

One possible thought is expanding the API, it seems pretty limited right now: http://disqus.com/developers/

I think it would be best to provide a standard solution that works for most users. The other chunk (people like you/me) can develop on top of the API creating whatever custom solution we need.

This is a win/win.

The other problem I see is being able to customize the comments.

I haven't played with Disqus enough to know this--but being able to customize the comments (IE: Strip out CSS and customize with my own, re-organize using my own markup, strip JS if I choose to) may be an issue for me.

Disqus looks the same across every blog I visit. Adding a way to customize comments would be extremely helpful.

As joshwa said, both of these problems could be solved with a better integrated WordPress plugin. Not to mention it could easily be extended with a more developed API.

The good news is Disqus seems to be listening. I see them replying everywhere they're talking about--which is great.

These are the primary reasons holding me back from using Disqus, any thoughts on adding these Disqus?

We actually already do that with our API version of the plugin. We're currently working on a new plugin which should deprecate our old JavaScript version.

Are threaded comments the killer feature of Disqus? I've never written a comment system myself but I don't think it's hard to hack it into an open source blog soft like WordPress. For hosted solutions like Blogger Disqus is awesome since you don't have to wait on Google to finally update it (and it looks like Google has abandoned Blogger).

Hey Ryan, I responded to your comment here: http://ryanspoon.com/blog/2008/05/15/disqus-after-5-days-on-...

This doesn't answer Ryan's key complaint though: that disqus sucks up all the SEO from blog comments on blogs that use it.

I think it's clear that they know that - it was the point of Ryan's post - but have chosen to not address it. As I see it, there is no good that can come (for them) from admitting this "feature". If they say, "Yes, it's a problem but..." then people will latch onto that. If they say, "It's not a problem though!" then people will ballyhoo them. If they ignore it though maybe the commenters will go away...

From the comments on the blog post - here is a threaded wordpress comment plugin: http://code.google.com/p/briansthreadedcomments/

I'd actually love to install Hacker News style comments... You?

I like threaded comment systems and I prefer digg/reddit since I can collapse them. Really though - how hard could it be? Any capable hacker could write the system to do such a thing in less than a day I would guess.

I like Hacker News comment system (though presentation could be better). I like the fact that you see the most relevant comments first. Whereas most other comment systems (even those with points) are chronological.

ps Digg just updated their comment system.

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