Trying out Disqus for Comments

You might have noticed that the comments for Universe Today look and behave a little differently today. That’s because we’re testing out a commenting platform called Disqus. If everything works out, it should provide a more feature rich, better looking, spam-defending comment system. The other cool thing is that it’s integrated with the rest of the Disqus network. Once you create a profile, you can write comments on thousands of other websites without having to create a profile on each one – something like this is going to be the future, so we might as well get on board now. Since Disqus is focused on creating the best possible commenting system, we should get carried along as they make improvements.

It’s still importing comments in from the WordPress system, so that’s going to take a few hours/days. Once that’s done, comments made in Disqus will be mirrored within WordPress, so we can always retreat to that system if this doesn’t work.

There’s one important decision that I still haven’t resolved yet: Who Can Comment? It can be set so anybody can reply to an article, which means there will be a lot of SPAM, but a lot of comments. I can tighten it down more (the current setting), so only registered users can comment. Or I can tighten it down even further so that users need to validate their email. I’m leaning towards the tightest control already, since I had a few nasty SPAM comments come in when I had it on the most open settings.

Anyway, let me know if you run into any problems. Let me know if things are displaying strangely for you, or you’re having trouble registering with the system.

Fraser Cain
Publisher
Universe Today