The pros and cons of commenting service Disqus
The waters are divided these days on the blog commenting service Disqus, which we’ve also installed here on the Kaplak Blog. Personally I was impressed with it when I first saw it on the How To Split The Atom blog, and decided it could do great work for the Kaplak Blog too. So when we moved the blog, it was a natural step to install their WordPress plugin.
What Disqus does is deliver a cross-blog and cross-platform commenting plugin for blogs, which hosts and connects comments, and feeds them back in different ways to the blogs. There are several great advantages from this ‘fragmentation of blog comments’, and so far about 4000 blogs (according to Disqus) think so too – and there are some apparent drawbacks, at least for time being.
I’ve been trying to gather the pros and cons of Disqus as it looks right now, and ultimately I am pretty undecided. Robin Good, blogger and new media reporter (who, among other things, did a remix of Steal This Film) sums the undecidedness up pretty well in this video :
To sum up as they’ve been put by Robin and others recently :
Pros
- Users who comment on different blogs can easily find their comments again and organize their discussions.
- Users are much more able to interact with other bloggers and commenters, independently of the blogs they comment on.
- Bloggers can easily reply to comments via Disqus email, which saves a lot of ‘logging in/out’ hazzle if you receive many comments.
- Discussions can be feeded easily from Disqus into other services, such as FriendFeed, drawing other people into following discussions and commenting.
Cons
- Bloggers potentially lose out on the Google juice provided by comments, while Disqus gets the juice – at least if they use the JavaScript based plugin.
- Bloggers potentially lose out on the income from ads, if too much commenting activity is moved from “their blog” to Disqus
- No support for trackbacks or pingbacks, which is a pain, since these play a vital role in the blogging “if I link to you, you link to me too” ecology. Daniel Ha of Disqus says they’re working on something big in this department. One can’t help but wonder, though, if they foresaw what kind of a dealbreaker not including this to begin with could be?
You can find Kaplak’s Disqus Community page here. I’m curious to learn more, as I am still pretty undecided. All things balanced out, for now we keep Disqus on the blog – even though we might use a temporary hack to enable WordPress trackbacks. In my current estimate the social benefits and effects of using Disqus are greater than the Google juice we get from comments (we don’t get a lot of comments yet), although it is a difficult estimate, since we are a young blog and needs to attract readers. I guess it adds up to this : why can’t we have both the Google juice and the trackbacks, as well as the great social functionality and effects that Disqus can give us?
How does the balance look for you and your blog or commenting habits? What are the scores, advantages and benefits? What is the dealbreaker?
Timeline
← Kaplak’s Online Strategy
→ Incentives for the slim end of the P2P tail
6 comments ↓
Alright, this is mega-uncool. Just found out that Disqus seems to index un-published posts in WordPress too. This is a major boo, and if not fixed ASAP will definitely get me off the service.
Couldn't find out how to contact Disqus support, so sent a tweet to Daniel Ha, co-founder of Disqus, and got this one back : http://twitter.com/danielha/statuses/832431033
Daniel also supplied a Javascript parameter by email, which could help avoid this. I still don't understand however, why or how previewed posts in WP could, should or ought to even appear in Kaplak's page on Disqus.
A page view sends a request out to Disqus to tell us that we need to create a thread for a particular page.
Unfortunately, previewing a post in WordPress is the same as viewing a published post. Disqus doesn't discriminate against those types.
In the next version, we will attempt to determine whether the post has a published status and set the parameter automatically.
Any timeline on the next version? Will I have to add the parameter to every post in order to avoid it showing up – or simply live with going in to the community page and removing pages there manually?
It gets me a bit uncomfortable, that readers may get incomplete posts or posts subject to later changes (I often write blogposts days, sometimes weeks or months in advance)
Yes, it's a priority.
You can either add the parameter or just not preview the post while
making drafts.
I’ve decided not to re-activate the Disqus plugin after setting up our new site architecture based on WordPress MU. The Disqus plugin for WordPress looks better now than ever (it answers several of the “cons” concerns mentioned above)
Ultimately, though, there are two reasons it didn’t come back (at least for the time being) :
1) We want to analyze the effects of our current projects (such as Kaplak Stream) on their own first. The Disqus plugin definitely helped the Kaplak Blog reach interested readers. Now we want to see where we stand on our own.
2) Apparently, there’s no easy way to manage several (i.e. a lot!) sites/blogs with one Disqus user account, or accomodate for several owners of a blog or site.
Additionally, it was frustrating to live with someone else’s rigid architecture and wait for the Disqus team to fix things when broken. Now we have our pingbacks back, and can install all the WP plugins we like. Freedom!
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