We switched WordPress comments to Disqus comments to take blog commenting and community development on our website to the next level. We encourage you to comment on our website to participate and engage in productive discussions with the interactive QOT community.
Many long time readers and Disqus users wanted us to integrate Disqus comments on our blog. We had tried earlier many blogging comment systems like Facebook comments, which is a surefire way to increase Facebook subscribers on your site. We also tried to install Disqus earlier, but there were errors which we were lazy to fix and opted for IntenseDebate comments which we tried for some time …
However, we persisted with the original WordPress comments since they could be easily cached by WordPress caching plugins and helped to load side faster. Moreover, WordPress comments were easier and to customise with CSS, and it was possible to expertly customise every component of the comments code with the theme functions file, like removing links to overcome Google Panda penalties.
Disqus Comments
Disqus 2012 was launched recently with some amazing features to build community on websites and blogs. Disqus has been a popular WordPress commenting platform since many years and the new update makes it even better and more useful for community building via an efficient, fast commenting system.
See the new features in Disqus 2012
It has the right mix of social media integration tools like Facebook, Twitter, Google plus and of course the huge Disqus community. These social login commenting features ensure that more real people integrate with your site by posting useful comments, rather than spam which overwhelms your comments and makes the discussion useless.
The new clean design blends with your web design, and does not require any additional CSS code to look like part of your site. There are a lot of custom options to modify how your comments look on this website. Note that the original WordPress comments are not lost, but instead are synced with the Disqus comments, which provide a more powerful interface for interactive blog comments, posting media, voting options, social media sharing options, spam control and much more.
See how you can discover your community with Disqus comments
Check out the new Disqus comments on this site, and post your thoughts in comments about it. I will later share with you how Disqus affected our site load time, and how we fixed Disqus errors to get the system live on the site in the next article.
Update: here is how we fixed WordPress export, Disqus import errors.