Yesterday night we added a new comment system on Seattle 2.0 provided by Disqus. It’s fascinating to me that comments on itself became an independent part of a blog that can be outsourced. A built-in comment system has several advantages which includes you to have a single database with the content and the comments relating to that content, in other words, you can do a lot of interesting manipulations in-house. A third party comment system breaks that integration and make everything its own silo, unless you use backend APIs.
So why did we decided to move to Disqus? Primarily, it was my own time constraint to add more features to our comments. I think there are a lot of innovation already happening with comments, like Facebook Connect and Twitter Auth, or video comments (which I disabled on Seattle 2.0). And there is probably more to come. I don’t consider owning the comments a critical part to the success of Seattle 2.0. With all this combined, it just made sense to move it all to a third party comments service.
Enough with the intangibles, what do users get? The improvements will get us:
· Facebook or Twitter account sign in (as well as Disqus account if anyone has that).
· Threaded comments (although I don’t think that’s super important for our volume)
· Comment notification
· We get a moderation system (we never had that).
We actually also lost something. We “lost” all previous comments. That’s primarily my laziness attitude since I didn’t want to put the work to do this. Also, comments count on the homepage are not going to show up until I implement the Disqus API (someday), and, finally, the way we are using Disqus it requires the browser to have JavaScript enabled, so people using cell phones (except iPhone) or people that have manually disabled JavaScript on their browsers will not see the comments.
Let me know if you find this buggy or you have any suggestions on how to improve this even more.