Blogs, at their best, are like finely tuned forums. Authors serve as moderators, starting discussion threads with posts. Some get particularly heated. But after two months of tuning in beta, Y Combinator’s Disqus is launching to make the forum comparison concrete. It looks like a great addition to heavily trafficked blogs thinking of enhancing their comment system.
Disqus is a javascript embed (as below) or blog plug-in (Wordpress, Blogger, TypePad, MovableType) that enhances your blog’s comments and integrates it with a fully moderated community forum. It’s kind of like SezWho or Intense Debate (another blog commenting system that launched a public beta today) plus forums. Tangler is expected to launch a similar commenting system attached to forums. Other commenting system like JS-Kit’s widget or CoComment’s comment tracking don’t build a community around blogs.
After installing, every post you make becomes a new thread in your own forum at yourforum.disqus.com. To keep it from not being a mirror of the blog, registered readers can also post new threads. All blog comments are posted to the forum and vice versa. Readers can post new comments under their own Disqus profile or anonymously. Fred Wilson’s blog is a good example of the service in action.
Disqus commenting system adds threads, comment/user ratings, spam control, and user identities. The system can either replace all your comments (starting from nothing), or only be activated on new posts. If you find it’s not what you want, you can just deactivate the plugin to get back your old comments.
The forums are fully skinnable and RSS enabled. You can follow threads or comments from other commentors. Frequent forum users will he happy to hear that you can receive updates and post replies by email as well. But Disqus isn’t just a community of commentors, it’s also a community of forums. Diqus’ main site serves as a hub for the hottest or most recent stories across all Disqus blogs.
The forums need to go through some greater evolution, though. Currently all threads are created equal and lumped into one overall category. What the system needs is some stratification between the best and worst commentors. Good commentors tend to be mini-blogging in blog comments and deserve a higher profile corner of the forums. Their system should reflect this.
But the move to greater engagement in the blogosphere echoed by Disqus and the other commenting startups (Intense Debate, SezWho) is a good one. However, each is only as good as the blogs they sign up. With each of the services being mutually exclusive, there are only so many strong blog communities to compete over. Growing big is much more complicated than other blogging community add-ons like MyBlogLog, which offered a much lower friction way adding interactivity to your blog through presence.
You can try their commenting system after the jump.
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This is more towards having blog forums as a service than doing it yourself.
Very innovative..will try to put in our social network.
http://www.meetingflex.com
Social Network + Video - Crap
and maybe now..disqus
Problem is that THEY own your comments now and like many other YCombinator “startups”, they could disappear as soon as their supply of Ramen noodles runs out.
Keep comments on your own servers! If they’re good, they’ll also be good for SEO. All these comments by 3rd parties are based on Javascript which means they’re invisible to search engines!
http://disqus.com/faq/:
“Will search engines still index my comments? :
Our plugins for self-hosted blogs place the actual comment content onto your page so nothing is lost. Search engines will index it perfectly.”
“Who owns the comment content?:
You do. We only tap into your comments to track and connect conversations. You are also able to export all of your comment content at any time.”
The “who owns the comments” thing is debatable, but as Nick says in the article, and their faq says, comments get placed into your page as well as the Disqus forum.
More functionality for less work and really well executed. Being able to add a full discussion into threads without any local backend required is a huge win for me as a developer. I’d love to see OpenID login to this but that aside, it’s spot on
Good work Disqus!
can you import an existing forum(phpbb or vbulletin) into this?
If all my blog’s comments are on another site, people are making comments to my blog on another site, and less time is spent on MY blog, what makes that a better solution for me?
@Stephen,
The comments are indexable by search engines.
@Jed,
The comments are placed and rendered on your own site. We do host and power forums as well, but you will be able to use your own domain.
@Daniel,
The comments on the example blog given above are not indexable by search engines. They might be indexable on your site but that’s not much use to bloggers.
Example:
http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2007.....d-my-.html
How exactly is stuff like this indexable by search engines?
var disqus_url = ‘http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2007/10/i-just-read-my-.html’;
var disqus_title = document.getElementById(’disqus_post_title’).innerHTML;
var disqus_message = document.getElementById(’disqus_post_message’).innerHTML;
This is DHTM insertion.
@Patrick,
Sorry, I didn’t finish what I had meant to write. We have an available plugin that makes use of our API so that it is not a Javascript call. This is when it is indexable.
I really like it. Very useful. I am going to see about plugging this into my blog. The blogspot commenting system annoys me anyway.
Comments are as valuable as the posts the commented was left on.
Content is very valued because most reader don’t comment unless
they have something valuable to say; except if you are spammer
trying to sell male enhancement. I hate those comments.
@Ed,
Comments are placed on your blog AND Disqus servers? Err, duplicate content penalties, anyone?
There is nothing better for SEO than self-hosted comment solution. While some things on blogs can be “outsorted” of sorts to some 3rd-party service, posts and comments just shouldn’t be.
am I the only person who finds them incredibly hard to read & follow? TC comments are easy to follow, those above are a mess to me.
@Amy
The styling is fully customizable. I am sure it could be made to look identical to TC comments
We actually wrote an article on our blog last year titled “Are blogs morphing into forums” and it seems to be happening.. blogosphere meets the boardscape.
Here is the blog post which is really on a forum dressed up like a blog..
http://blog.boardtracker.com/viewtopic.php?t=35
What about a forum that exports certain posts to the blog format? I’ve been using invisionpower board’s messageboard system for years and it allows you to select what posts you want to export to the “blog format”/portal. With invisionpower board, I have certain posts exported to the blog format while the rest of the board serves as an interactive directory system.
Why don’t you do a profile on Invision Power Board now?
For the people who are already invested in the blog format, I assume the subject addin would allow them to have a forum integrated with their blogs. But, having a blog that is a export from the forum is much better in my view.
Pibb ( http://pibb.com ) already has a blog comments plugin for WordPress located here:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pibb-comments/
You can also manually embed a Pibb thread in any web page…
To see this in action you can check out http://janrain.com/blog
Also why arent any of these new services supporting OpenID?
I review DISQUIS, in my opinion this site can help your blog to raise returning visitors
Hi Nick,
Thank you for including JS-Kit in your post.
Why 8,500+ sites have choosen
JS-Kit Comments:
~ EZ install with 2 lines of HTML
~ Fully customizable with CSS & Templates
~ Full SPAM protection
~ Consolidated view & sorting of all comments for EZ admin.
~ Optional pre-moderation of all comments or just new users
~ Post Modertation (Block Session or IP)
~ RSS feed for all Comments back to the publisher
~ Complete SEO by pointing our RSS feed to the publishers domain
~ Visitors can “Score” comments
~ Visitors can sort comments by Date, User Name, or Score
~ Visitors can receive eMail replies to their comments
~ Visitors can view their comments over 8,500 JS-Kit registered sites
~ Comment window can be Paginated, Pop-up, or In-Line
~ Pagination supports pre-fetching for fast page loads
~ Dashboard for all Comment & Rating activity across site
~ Fully integrated with JS-Kit Ratings
~ Threading can be toggled on/off
~ World class reference sites such as:
HBO New Series “Tell Me You Love Me” http://www.hbotellus.com/
~ and much more…
Best,
Khris Loux
CEO JS-Kit
The site can raise recurring visitors, yet I don’t entirely like the interface set forth concerning the placement of comments. For WordPress and blogging platforms, the comments area are nice and clean with regards to sites such as TechCrunch. For a forum feeling, one needs to install forum software, end of story. I could see this platform for blog comments to become chaotic and highly covered in garbage. Personally, I wouldn’t add this functionality to any of my sites, there are just too many variables and it seems disorganized.
Keep commenting and threading (forums) separate.
I would prefer a forum system I can host on MY domain instead of somebody elses… search engine traffic is already tough to come by without sending it all over to another site.
Jon
@Jon,
I agree. We’re offering support to use one’s own domain (e.g. forums.jonsblog.com) with our hosted forums that connect with your comment system.
Not as good as the other thing!
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
I wonder what is the monetisation model behind these?
I’m still so new at this that I don’t have an opinion as far as it’s pros and cons. So far so good. I think it’s a great idea.
We just installed Disqus on our site. I can’t wait to see if it improves commenting by causing flame wars to thread better and forcing relevant comments to the top. Time will tell, but I hope it works.
Is it possible to add disqus to a regular webpage other than a Wordpress, Blogger, TypePad, MovableType blog? if so how to go about?
I stumbled on your blog on google and after reading a few of your other posts, I’ve decided to add your rss to my Google News Reader.
Im just checking if this works
NICE POST HAH
Hii !,..
The site can raise recurring visitors, yet I don’t entirely like the interface set forth concerning the placement of comments. For WordPress and blogging platforms, the comments area are nice and clean with regards to sites such as TechCrunch. For a forum feeling, one needs to install forum software, end of story.
Blogging News - Blogging News Information You Can Use
Thanks!,,.. Thanks!,..
Adding Disqus is one of the very best things I’ve done for my blog, period.
>>> The system can either replace all your comments (starting from nothing), or only be activated on new posts
I didn’t find that option, and here’s what their support forum replied: http://disqus.disqus.com/using.....wer_posts/
Any insight would be greatly appreciated, thanks
Great Post, thanks for these info
Great Info, thanks please keep up this great work
I think DISQUIS can help your website to get more visitors
It’s the threading of comments that makes DisQus a winner for me.