DISQUS

fredwilson · 1 year ago

daniel and his co-founder Jason are the right people focused on the right problem at the right time. it's a formula for success. but their "customer comes first" attitude is also really important.

one thing i'd like is to have all the comments, both the ones in friendfeed and the ones in disqus in one single thread. i think a tight FF/disqus integration, that goes both ways, is really needed.

aac74 · 1 year ago

yep Friendfeed is the third hosted/centralised comment system with disqus and intense debate.

Would be great to have all these systems in one place.

smbeebe · 1 year ago

Thanks Louis for sharing your dinner experience with Daniel Ha of Disqus. I too am very impressed with his business success and savvy management of Disqus at the young age of only 22...wow! Daniel displays an incredible interest in serving his customers and goes above and beyond to provide maximum value. I strongly feel that his product and anything he sets his mind to will do extremely well because HE is behind it. I will be watching him as he moves and shakes SV.
Susan Beebe

Jesse Stay · 1 year ago

I too was impressed with the maturity at such a young age when Scoble and I went to visit with them. Daniel's a really cool guy - I'm excited to see what's in store for them.

klecu · 1 year ago

As far as monetization, I wonder if Daniel and co. have considered a behind-the-firewall enterprise version. I know I'd be interested in that for my employer (a large and technically influential organization). Especially useful to the enterprise would be commenting across wikis, blogs, and other applications.

Louis Gray · 1 year ago

I didn't play investigative reporter during dinner. Food was too good. But I did mention to him that other sites which proved themselves in the free consumer realm had big plans for enterprise solutions, which could be licensed. I wouldn't be surprised if Disqus had similar plans.

Dewald Pretorius · 1 year ago

Thank you Louis. Your post convinced me to put Disqus on my blog as well.

The integration of their WordPress plugin wasn't as seamless as I would have liked it to be. It created a separate comments link HREF on the index page view, while not completely removing the default HREF that WordPress inserts. That created an issue in my theme. It showed a hyperlink with no anchor text (the WP comments link) and another hyperlink to the Disqus comment section.

Not a very big deal, but I had to edit my theme's index.php and archive.php to test if Disqus is active, and then conditionally either insert the default WordPress comments link or the Disqus comments link.

EricFriedman · 1 year ago

It looks like to have a steady flow of conversation about this post in both friendfeed and your disqus comments. Thanks for sharing your discussion - definitely great that you are so close to so many startups in Silicon Valley. I like integration of both streams of conversation on your site - makes it very easy to follow the flow of what people are talking about, and a quick way to respond to all of them.

baratunde · 1 year ago

Daniel has been incredible. I didn't know he was the CEO. I thought he was solely some sort of community evangelist. I posted a question to the forums, and he got back within hours with a solution that worked just right for me.

I have no idea how I commented before Disqus and plan to move it to my larger blog shortly.

BTW, I wish the default position of the comment box was BELOW other comments. I think you should move it there. folks should have to skim existing comments before repeating something, and in your case, the input box sits in the middle of friendfeed and disqus comments.

tis all. thanks for the writeup. can't wait for the wordpress import so my legacy comments are in.

TMC2K · 1 year ago

Great Post! Even better discussion!

I have one point to argue. Daniel is not young :-)

Many software/internet success stories are started and managed by "young" people. Look at MSFT, GOOG, YHOO, DELL, Facebook, etc.

While Daniel may be young relative to the people who read and comment here, he is not young by precedent. I think it takes relative youth to be able to pull these things off. Disqus is one of those ideas that seems obvious in retrospect but i wouldn't have come up with the idea. Cheers Daniel and team.

Jake · 1 year ago

I've been very impressed by Daniel and his team. They do a great job with outreach and building goodwill, which at the end of the day, goes a long way when you don't have a full feature set yet.

Alan Wolk · 1 year ago

Using it on blogger. I love it b/c I can respond to comments via email.

But readers have complained that as conversation threads get going , the space available to write in- the actual window-- is so narrow, as to make their replies look like a list of words.

Any thoughts on that? Blogger problem or universal?

Louis Gray · 1 year ago

That's due to the width of your page. Disqus will fill the width available, and looking at your site, it's fairly narrow, in terms of where the body of your story is. If you were to expand the posts horizontally, Disqus would fill the gap. But unless you do, you will absolutely have these issues.

Alan Wolk · 1 year ago

Thanks for the tip, Louis. Since readers seemed to care less about threaded comments, I just eliminated that function and the narrowness issue was gone.

But attempting to update the layout caused major problems: on Blogger, Disqus either integrates comments from (a) the day you start using Disqus or (b) day one of your blog.

If you reinstall Disqus, you lose all the comments between the day you actually first started using Disqus and the day of the reinstall.

I was able to get around that via a cheat - tricking the Mac into thinking it was two months earlier - but I think I just got lucky.

Daniel's been incredibly responsive and then some- both on his blog and on Twitter- and I have no doubts that Disqus will have that problem sorted out soon enough

I solved that via a "cheat" - resetting the Mac to an earlier date and reinstalling

Sylvain Carle · 1 year ago

I had the chance to grab a quick coffee with Daniel last year, around his office at Cafe Sapore - http://web2places.com/places/us/california/san-... - and I was quite impressed by his perspective and maturity... the next challenge is the integration of comments in what I would call parallel publishing platform, that's what I'm working on at Praized... I think Disqus is well positioned to play in this next level of commenting, Seesmic too, on the video level. The web as the (distributed) platform is in great shape.

ampressman · 1 year ago

Louis, in a kind of Larry Lessig-like way, I'm really interested in how code becomes law, or how the rights of commenters and blog authors are preserved (or not) by Disqus. I know it's an ongoing debate across the web whether blog authors should be able to edit, delete or otherwise mess with comments. As far as I can tell, Disqus lets me, as a blog author, delete an offending comment but that's all. As a blog commenter, I can edit my comment without any indication that the comment has been changed, to the point of erasing the whole thing.

Did you talk about that whole debate with Daniel at all? He's certainly young but in a position to help think through ways to balance everybody's rights/desires/needs on this one.

Louis Gray · 1 year ago

I didn't bring up the saving and editing discussion. I feel that over time, as each of these comment engines grows and adds features, users will expect standardization. Through competition, each will be prompted to deliver "best practices", whatever those are determined to be. The same goes for interoperability, portability, etc.

Zach · 1 year ago

Honestly, I don't know what I did before Disqus. It's just too good to pass on - it has never been so simple to interact with my readers in an organized manner, and that's why I use it. I just hope that some day I can recover the 3,000+ comments I had on one of my blogs before switching over... ;)

William Stewart · 1 year ago

Disqus has made it very easy to put comments on your page, and integrate through the blogs. I'm interested to see how FriendFeed integration will improve the process.

Richard Cunningham · 1 year ago

It's still hard to find out if a blog uses disqus from the feeds and to find out what the comments were. Also, there is no way to get your friends list from disqus (which is stopping me from implementing it in FriendBinder)

Louis Gray · 1 year ago

Good points. And this is a great forum to do it. I have the fullest confidence that Daniel will see this post and your comment. It's likely the team will be listening soon.

Richard Cunningham · 1 year ago

I hope they do implement this soon - As it stands getting the comment feed from a blog that doesn't use Disqus is often easier, as people often have <wfw:commentRss> tags which point to them

blvds1 · 1 year ago

Is this SaaS?

robdiana · 1 year ago

@Richard Cunningham

I had the same problem, but the Disqus guys are very helpful. There are two standard ways that things get implemented on the source blog. Daniel can definitely point it out.

gregorylent · 1 year ago

as a blogless hobo in the web'o'sphere i love the threaded part, it has allowed me to "meet" smart people and comment on comments .... blogs without it seem dull, merely soapboxes, rather than coffee houses or cafes with conversation....

gregorylent · 1 year ago

you can even talk to yourself

Mark Evans · 1 year ago

I've got Disqus on one blog - allaboutnortel.com - and more than happy with it. I would love to see a feature that lets you back up comments just in case something happens to Disqus or the service. As well, stats would be awesome because you can never have too many stats packages. :)

Mark

Jay Cuthrell · 1 year ago

Mark - I'm a long time AAN reader. Rock on!

Comment import/export was what my concerns were when I evaluated DISQUS previously. You should be able to back up comments in an XML format:

http://disqus.com/migrate/buckpost/

I still have no update on when IMPORT will be made available. Also, the manual backup export route is a bit tedious and it would be better served having a batch automation option that publishes to S3 or via an agent/scriptlet on your host (assuming you run your own WP installation).

It's all a question of where they will be in 2-3 years -- i.e. viable or a massive orphaned data pile

Christopher Harley · 1 year ago

Good news on the 'trackbacks' but what was his take on the FriendFeed integration? Now that would be an awesome addition to an already awesome service.

Phil Glockner · 1 year ago

Excellent write-up. I am going to take notes from this post. Also, it's great to hear about some new things that are right around the corner! I'm definitely looking forward to what comes next.

Thanks for the article!

redeuxx · 1 year ago

Nice post. I started using Disqus before I knew about the other discussion sites and it's nice to know I'm using one of the better services. If there was only one thing I wanted from Disqus, it would be the ability to import my WP posts.

Kenn Bell · 1 year ago

I love it! Though the sidebar widget gave me so much trouble I had to remove it.
One wish? That when I reply to someone's comment on my site, I don't want to have to approve my own comment. Any chance they could implement that?

Louis Gray · 1 year ago

I don't moderate comments on my site, so I wouldn't know. But from what I've seen, Disqus treats me like any other user on the thread. In theory, I would like to not show up as the leading commenter on my own site, so that's part of the same issue. I assume to not have to moderate your own comments, you'd have to not monitor anyone's comments.

benwaynet · 1 year ago

I use my own install of wordpress, I use plugins that use comments like commentluv, subscribe to comments, top commenter, most popular post,Comment Relish,etc.
If I changed to disqus I would lose those features.
Also does it tie into co.mments or coComments?

John Chan · 1 year ago

Brilliant post!

JC John Sese Cuneta (謝施洗) · 1 year ago

I believe we need a lot more people like Daniel focused on delivering a great customer experience with real benefits, who are less focused on the day to day fights between competitors than they are on getting the service perfected.

Can't agree more. Quality Service > Worrying about competition

And he's only 22? Lol. I can't believe that! I'm 26 haha, oh my... bright minds are getting younger and younger eh?

Marty Martin · 1 year ago

It'd be great if there was a site where you could look over other sites using DISQUS.

adapter · 1 year ago

BTW, I wish the default position of the comment box was BELOW other comments. I think you should move it there. folks should have to skim existing comments before repeating something, and in your case, the input box sits in the middle of friendfeed and disqus comments.

charlie · 1 year ago

seems like a good service

Apostle John · 1 year ago

Testing

colinwong · 1 year ago

Good stuff

laurusnobilis · 1 year ago

Disqus is winning simply bacause is giving more than their competitors.

disker · 1 year ago

Just tested Disqus. It's really good.

Locksmith Madison · 11 months ago

First of all, the comments are nice and threaded and you have one login over all of your comments on all blogs. There were some things that were still bad but they were just fixed:

* Your blogs comments are now included via an API in a SEO friendly manner and not via JavaScript.
* The comments are synced back to your wordpress installation so you are not loosing anything and can always switch back.
* You can import in your old comments … theoretically, failed for me up till now but let’s give them some time. You can set it to only be the commenting system on commentless posts and new ones.
* You can moderate via your wordpress admin.

Francesco Eandi · 10 months ago

I'm gonna test it. Hope this service is good also on custom website (no WP, no Blogger, and so on).

Ram · 9 months ago

ok more comment to test it

Dr David Black · 7 months ago

Disqus allow us to make telling points in a few words.
It's great !
Dr.David Black
www.blackchiropractic.com.au

2Shaye · 4 months ago

Louis, thanks for this informative post. I just recently posted on possibly moving to Disqus. I hope you don't mind, but I've linked to this post for anyone else looking for more information. I'm hopeful that some experienced users might come share a few comments on pluses and concerns. It appears that things are changing rapidly as people are asking for changes. Great news!

tweetfashdotcom · 2 months ago

Supporting this tool by commenting here - thanks for your coverage of this important web 2.0 tool and hope this spreads.