Which blog comment system is better – Disqus or IntenseDebate? That’s the subject in Scott Jangro’s great post: “Comment Systems Review Redux” as well as his earlier post about evaluating such systems.
I admit that I’m still a bit cautious about using either. I understand some of the arguments for using such systems instead of just the “regular” comment system of your blog platform… but I’m not yet convinced it’s worth doing. Scott’s review is very helpful, yet raises these questions:
- Comment Spam – As Scott notes, human spammers will get through most anything. Part of my question is what do you get with Disqus or IntenseDebate that you don’t get with, say, Akismet?
- Community – One of the more compelling arguments for using a system is that it will help create a “community” among those who frequently comment – yet Scott seems to indicate that this isn’t terribly useful so far. So what, then is the value of such a system?
I guess my other concerns include:
- Load Time – Are there any metrics out there on what, if any, time is added to the load time of using a blog comment system? One of my concerns right now across all my blog sites is that by including all these various other services, I’m increasing the amount of time it takes to load the page. Look at the right columns of this page… content in some of the blocks there is loaded via pulling RSS feeds, which adds to the display time.
- Availability – How “available” are these systems? i.e. what assurances do I have that they’ll be up and running? What happens if they are not available? Will people still be able to leave comments? Will the post still load?
Obviously I need to do some more digging and research. But I guess I’m still not clear on the exact problem that Disqus and IntenseDebate are trying to solve. Now I don’t deal with zillions of comments on this site, so perhaps I’m simply not the target audience.
Regardless, I’m still watching and monitoring… and I’m very glad to see articles like this that help differentiate between the different systems.
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blogging, comments, disqus, intensedebate, socialmedia, tools
I’m taking a similar wait-and-see approach with blog commenting systems. I’ve seen several bloggers singing the praises of services like Disqus and IntenseDebate, but my own experience using them to read through other comments or leaving comments of my own haven’t exactly blown me away (I’ve seen some bugs).
Comments from others, including you in this post, give me pause.
In the way of complete disclosure, I have dabbled briefly with Disqus for a couple of short-term, family-oriented Tumblr blogs, but Tumblr doesn’t come with built-in commenting functionality. I had to add *something.*
In short, I’m yet to be convinced that I should abandon the built-in comment functionality of my WordPress blogs in favor of an add-on system like Disqus or IntenseDebate. But I’m keeping an open mind about it.
Bryan | @BryanPerson
I like the concept of a universal commenting system because it is one place to have all my comments on throughout the various blogs I follow. However, it requires one of these systems to ‘win.’ I use Disqus for that reason among others. One being that I didn’t have to manually add Facebook Connect. I just had to get a couple IDs from Facebook to do it.
But with Facebook Connect and Open Social it’s all changing pretty quickly anyway. It’ll all shake out over the next 6-12 months.
A good post, Dan.
I’ve been running IntenseDebate since mid November. I like the concept of a comment management system like this a lot – especially how it syncs data with your WordPress database – but I have very mixed feelings about how IntenseDebate actually works and the interference it has with aspects of WordPress and plugins that are important to me (more on that in my own blog post a few days ago http://tinyurl.com/8h2qkn)
Decision for me very soon on whether to continue or not. Right now, the weight is on ‘or not.’
Heya Dan,
The value prop of comment systems has changed over the years. At first it was an attempt to fill in the basic feature gap between what fledgling blogging platforms provided and what bloggers actually wanted. Features like enhanced moderation, threading, emoticons etc.
3rd party comment systems continue to evolve at a pace that far exceeds the commenting services of most CMS platforms, however their focus and value have changed.
These days the focus is on turning passing commenters into members of a blogs community. Features like visitor profiles (particularly in JS-Kit’s case) help to sprinkle your comment across the web driving more traffic, engagement and context for everyone.
I’ve always said that blogs are the ultimate distributed social network platforms – commenting services today are scratching the surface of that potential.
I look at it from another angle. There seems to be little downside to trying Intense Debate or Disqus now that they both sync comments locally and on their respective servers. Simply deactivate the plugin and you are right back where you were – nothing lost.
I also look at it from the prospective of someone that has written thousands of comments across blogs over the years. All that intellectual effort is largely lost. I have no way of tracking who has commented on those comments short of remembering to visit every post I ever commented on. That sure isn’t going to happen.
As a commenter, I want a unified system whereby I can see all the comments I ever wrote and when I get notifications when others reply to my comments.
And, as a blogger, I want to make that service available to my commenters. As a service to them, to keep them coming back and to value my site more.
As it is, I’ll likely never return to this site and never know who replied to this comment. But, if disruptiveconversations WAS using IntenseDebate, I’d be notified if a reply to a comment of mine was made – bring me back, posssibly over and over again. Isn’t that what you as a blogger wants?
Granted, if the ID servers consistently failed, if load times were substantially adversely affected, those would all be reasons to leave. But leaving is now so easy. Click a ‘deactivate’ button and you default back to your own hosted comments, with none of them lost.
I also see other disadvantages which I wrote about in my “How to Install Intense Debate in WordPress 2.7” post:
http://www.daleisphere.com/how-to-install-intensedebate-in-wordpress-27/
None are significant enough to make me walk away at this point. But, I’m brand new to this and might find other disadvantages. If I do, I’ll update that post.
Bryon posted above:
“I like the concept of a universal commenting system because it is one place to have all my comments on throughout the various blogs I follow. However, it requires one of these systems to ‘win.’ I”
Had Intense Debate or Discuss been installed on this site, I could have replied to that comment directly. As such, my response to his post appears several comments down. Here’s my response: