12 replies to this topic

[Dr.Marie]

Do any of you use Disqus for comments?

http://www.disqus.com

I've decided to give them a try on some parts of my site. So far I am impressed. I mostly like the fact that I can now add commenting to even the static (i.e. non-Wordpress) pages in my site.

My main concern is what would happen if disqus ever decided to call it quits. Do I lose all of my comments?

I see that a good number of the SEO related blogs that I follow are implementing disqus so this is what motivated me to give it a try.

What do you think?

[EGOL]

I like the idea of getting comments this way.

I think that your concern about the longevity of the company is valid.

The history of the internet is a story of small service providers popping up and offering a service only to fail and disappear. I know a guy who had a PR7 site built on the aol "hometown" subdomain... when they closed that he lost his site an a massive amount of traffic with no opportunity to redirect.

Have you considered Facebook Connect?
http://developers.fa.../blog/post/198/

[Dr.Marie]

I am currently using Facebook Comments on my article pages. I love the idea that when someone comments, the comments posts to their news feed and my site gets publicity.

However, I can't for the life of me see anywhere where I can moderate these comments. Plus, they are not searchable by search engines. (I have read of a way to override this but haven't put any time into fixing it yet.)

Disqus seems to add more benefits on top of Facebook as well. If an article gets shared on Twitter then this person's avatar is added to my page. The moderation of comments is very intuitive. Plus, people can comment using a number of different personas such as Twitter, FB, Wordpress and more.

[EGOL]

Great... I am glad that you have researched this.

Disqus seems indeed to be better for SEO.

[Dr.Marie]

I was just reading an article on how to create widgets. The article used disqus comments, so I clicked "Like". A button popped up that said something like, "We're glad you liked this page! Would you like to share it on Facebook and Twitter?" So, I clicked a button and tweeted that I was learning about creating widgets.

This is very cool as before I wouldn't have thought to Tweet the page. The other cool thing is that when I log into disqus it shows me what pages I've "liked". So, I can use it as a sort of bookmarking as well.

LOL...now I'm sounding like a disqus commercial.

[rustybrick]

I use disqus, but I use the API to print the comments for search engines in a noscript tag.

[jonbey]

Does Discus provide a backup plan, e.g. storing a copy of comments on your blog, just in case?

[iamlost]

Data synchronization, Disqus Docs.

Basically you would need to:

1. Set up a datastore so you can store comments locally.
2. Synchronize comments from Disqus to your datastore.
3. Fetch and render comments on pages.

See also:
WordPress Troubleshooting, Disqus Docs.
Disqus Comment System, Disqus Comment System, WordPress Plugin Directory

For further information read the documentation.

[Dr.Marie]

@rustybrick Hi! I didn't know you were a member here. Your blog is actually one of the ones that convinced me to use disqus as I see that it works well for you.

For some reason I thought that the comments were automatically indexable. I didn't realize you had to use the API - will look into that now.

Does anyone know if you can use disqus for pages with dynamic urls? I suppose it wouldn't be hard for me to test. But I have a few thousand pages on my site that are the same url with ?id=xxxx added to the url. I'd love to be able to have comments on these pages that I can moderate!

[Ron Carnell]

As a user, I dislike Disqus and similar services. There are a large handful of discussions I follow but never comment on because to do so would require me to accept third-party cookies. I could do that, of course, but I'd have to have a really good reason to change my browser settings to accommodate a web site. To me, that's too much like the old days where sites insisted your screen resolution should be such and such.

[Michael_Martinez]

I don't really like Disqus as a user, either, but at least when spammers hammer Disqus comment threads their links don't threaten the integrity of the Websites. Search engines don't see them.

I don't have an opinion on whether Disqus will help you connect with more users or not. I would say its advantages exist mostly on the administrative side of things.

[tylerdisqus]

I commented earlier today at Can Google Index Disqus Comments? No But Here Is How while awaiting approval for my account registration here, but wanted to loop back here as well.

To elaborate on what iamlost mentioned earlier in this thread, our WordPress plugin already renders comments server-side so manually rendering comments server-side -- e.g., by following our Data synchronization guide -- is redundant/unnecessary. Our MovableType, Drupal, and Blogger integrations/plugins also offer an option to sync comments from Disqus back to the respective platform so they can be rendered server-side with a little extra love as well.

If you're not using one of those platforms, rendering comments server-side is the process you'd perform so comments can be seen by search engines. The easiest way is by using above-linked guide.

Hope that helps clarify things a bit. Feel free to continue the conversation here or shoot us a message at http://disqus.com/support or http://twitter.com/disqus if we ever lend a hand with anything, SEO-related or otherwise.

[burton]

I have used disqus for a while but I also like commentluv to