Switching to Disqus Comments

You may have noticed that I have switched to Disqus comments on here. I’ve been looking at them for some time, and finally decided to switch for three reasons:

1/ Several of the blogs I read and enjoy have switched recently.

2/ The Drupal commenting system on my blog isn’t user friendly for commentators – Drupal doesn’t remember you when you come back to comment again so you have to fill in all the fields each time. My thanks to Doug Dillard for drawing my attention to that.

3/ The system to allow people to subscribe to a comment thread was broken!

Disqus moves blog commenting onto a whole new plain. For a start it takes the comments off your blog, and they are then hosted by Disqus, and here are some other key points:

The viral benefit – Disqus feeds to Facebook connect, meaning comments can appear on Facebook walls
Easy to use for people – they can log in via their Twitter, Facebook account or via Open ID, and once they’ve registered with Disqus, the site will recognize them every time, making commenting quick and easy
Readers can push their comments out to Friendfeed or Twitter easily, again giving potential viral benefits
The email subscribe service works!
It’s easy to see where else a commenter has left comments, so you can find other similar sites quickly
Spam is pretty much unheard of as all comments are verified in one way or another
It’s a fully featured system with trackback, threaded discussions and the system will check Twitter and other places for reactions to a post

There are two downsides for me. There is currently no system to import existing Drupal comments, although Disqus are reportedly working on that (there is for Wordpress though) which means I have had to leave my old system live to avoid losing my 2000 comments. I’ve simply hidden the comment form, and once the import tool is available, I’ll bring them in to Disqus and turn the old system off. The only other downside is the loss of “Comment luv” which benefited everyone leaving a comment. But I hope the ease of the new system will keep people coming back to leave more comments.

What do you think of Disqus?

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