Added Disqus for Better Comments

After lis­ten­ing to the lat­est Net@Night pod­cast #53 by Amber MacArther and Leo Laporte I decided to inves­ti­gate and then imple­ment the com­ment­ing sys­tem from Disqus (pro­nouced like dis­cuss). This will do a cou­ple things which I believe will ben­e­fit this site and those on it who wish to make com­ments. I am look­ing for mul­ti­ple ways to make this site bet­ter so that even­tu­ally, peo­ple will actu­ally start vis­it­ing it regularly.

To quote from their web­site, “Disqus enables blog­gers to make the con­ver­sa­tions on their blogs more inter­ac­tive and man­age­able. Our dis­trib­uted com­ment sys­tem con­nects read­ers across blog com­mu­ni­ties, while empow­er­ing pub­lish­ers in pro­mot­ing their content.”

Disqus allows eas­ier post­ing of com­ments. You will be allowed to post a com­ment annony­mously. I will still mod­er­ate all com­ments, that is, I will read them before mak­ing them pub­lic. If you have a Disqus account and have a good rep­u­ta­tion, I sus­pect many of your com­ments will end up being approved with­out even a mod­er­a­tor read­ing it.

Disqus will also allow for threaded com­ments. Something I think will be very nice once this site gets some traf­fic. Sometimes it is very hard to fol­low what is going on in a heav­ily com­mented post. By thread­ing, you should be able to fol­low what peo­ple are say­ing better.

Disqus will allow com­ments to be made on the go — email and mobile com­ments.  Not sure how this will work. I am a touch wor­ried about spam­mers but accord­ing to Leo, he hasn’t seen any on his blog since it imple­mented Disqus.

Disqus allows for rat­ing com­ments. This allows those active in the com­ment­ing world to pro­mote oth­ers who are good and pun­ish the flam­mers and trolls. This ends up pro­vid­ing some self-moderation among the commentors.

I am not sure about this but it hit me while talk­ing to a friend who recently had his Joomla based site defaced. With the com­ments being saved on Disqus, I am won­der­ing if deface­ment becomes less likely. That is, com­ments posted with nas­ties will get sent to Disqus and not my server. As such, the hack­ing code stays away from this site. Something I should ask the guys at Disqus about.

Once you see the ben­e­fits of Disqus as a com­men­tor, you may want encour­age all blogs to have it since it allow you to see what you have com­mented on every blog that uses it. You can even have an RSS feed of your com­ments so oth­ers can fol­low what you are say­ing on all the dif­fer­ent blogs you read and com­ment on.

Enjoy!