Disqus V3 Is Live On This Blog

Comments (Archived):

1. I am VERY interested in this update. I’ve had mixed feelings using Disqus on my personal blog due to spam getting through. And this has kept me from launching it on my business’ blog, despite my strong desire to give my customers a means of communicating freely via comments.

   1. i used typepad’s comment system for about four years before moving to disqus. i get way less spam now and it is simple to delete the spam that i do get (maybe one or two a week). you can even delete the comment spam via email which is great for me.

      1. This might sound crazy, but how about an option to disable “guest” comments? For certain sites, requiring a Facebook/Twitter/OpenId/etc log-in to comment isn’t outrageous.

         1. there is already option like that, look at your settings, i tried and then disabled, too confusing for the readers

            1. I just scanned my settings and didn’t see anything like that. Can you elaborate?

            2. under settings – admin/permissions set it to “registered”

            3. Well, I see why it’s confusing: it doesn’t remove the name/email/website fields. An ideal implementation should require authentication via the available sites (FB, OpenId, etc) first and then allow a comment to be entered. Maybe we’ll see this in v3?

            4. I had an email exchange with Daniel Ha, stating pretty much what you wrote (although I would give preference to Disqus with email over FB or OID). He has some reasons for the fields to remain. I don’t think it makes sense and I don’t think they will change that setting in the next version.

            5. We did a lot of field testing with this, actually. As with everything on the web, nothing is ever set in stone and I’m constantly revisiting this. But now for the explanation…You can set the options so that Guest commenting is disabled, however the fields still do show up. Once the user submits his comment, he is required to finish registration before the post is completed. We’ve found that this increased the number of people willing to comment many, many times.Simply put, a comment form hidden behind a “You must register” wall is scary to everyone.

            6. Daniel, thanks for the reply! I would say (speaking for myself, my website and my customers) that “you must register” is indeed scary but “you must authenticate via Twitter or Facebook” is not. Now, my customers are 21-35 y/o, so maybe I’m a niche case. But I really, really want to limit comments to “real” people with “real” avatars. Just my $0.02.

            7. That’s a very elegant solution.

            8. Looking at this thread, I want to know for certain if it is a necessary feature to display who is in reply to whom. I keep debating back and forth. Is there the ability to turn that off for testing. It may be useful in long, tangled threads, and in short ones, it might not. Just an internal debate.

            9. I like it. It helps a lot on email moderating

            10. Can’t see that from my end- though I do notice that the standard browser on a BB can’t display comments whereas Opera can…

            11. Daniel, the preview said the word “real time” at the end. What parts are real time with the new release?

            12. Some parts aren’t enabled yet on this site. We’re testing things out in stages.That’s one of the disabled parts. 🙂

            13. Daniel, I know we emailed about that. Here my take again. You announce to a user that they must login through one of the 4 – Disqus, FB, Twitter, or OpenID. And 4 buttons are presented. The expectation is that you must go through one of the 4 buttons to comment. The best way is to have a “hover” above Disqus asking to register.Otherwise the fields are confusing and a bit deceptive because AFTER a person filled out the fields there is a “trap” in the next step. I find this a bit dishonest and not a good treatment of my users really.Anyway, a registration is a barrier, anyway you put it, but if a site owner already decided to have no anonymous comments, etc. he understands that there is barrier but still considers the benefits, etc.

            14. BTW, there is a bug. I write comment below responding to you. When I did an edit, the comment jumped to the bottom of the thread after save.

            15. I see that my reply to crabasa was also pushed to the bottom of the thread after edit and save.

         2. I think that is an option but I’ve never used it

      2. Were the instructions for installing the new Disqus on this Typepad blog easier to follow? Many of us are still struggling with linking Typepad and Disqus in general, despite adding to others easily such as Tumbler.

         1. Typepad makes it so damn hard to install disqus. Please complain to them. I think they are tired of hearing from me on the topic

   2. This is a comment for the sake of usability and editing

2. love that it is even showing now how many comments i’ve made (and likes). Great to encourage people to leave a comment vs. just looking at comments. The reply by email feature is the other one – again encouraging more timely ‘discussion’ in the comments. Go disqus Go!*** now editing *** wonder if the edits go to the moderator’s email. Fred?Scroll box in edit mode makes it a bit weird. (can only see 4 lines of my comment right now)

   1. in terms of feedback – reply brings a nice simple inline reply box. Edit is a nice feature too. Makes me think more towards wiki-ish comment threads. Wonder how it will be used in practice. Will try that next.One thing though… whitespaces are a bit big around comment text for me. A bit of an ’empty’ feel.

3. I look forward to all the new changes. Any ideas on competing head to head wlth Js-kits real time echo conversation system? Am I the only user who consistently imagines merging his favorite utility features into one product. Feature bloat..

   1. I don’t like the comments getting commingled with retweets. They aren’t comments in my book. So I don’t like the echo implementation. But you know I’d say that

      1. I agree with this, also I think Echo needs to worry long term in their implementation about character controls (especially outside of the US) and if spending lots of time on one page is what they want out of a product. Totally theoretical (I happen to like Disqus), but what would happen if their internal statistics are correct that people do spend more time on a Echo page. And then everyone implements Echo, then what?Clearly not the answer.

         1. I enjoy echo and disqus for different reasons. I like the real time conversational style of echo as it’s similar to friendfeed streaming.I do prefer disqus for my blog at the moment but I’m tempted by echo.

            1. Be tempted. My arguments still holds 🙂 Time is one of those very weird things to have reactions to.

      2. I’m still unsure how to sort the real time conversation. Where do we draw the line between juicy/length comments and microblog shares? My gutt says discriminating between 140bytes vs longer comments/posts is a good idea. But then we’re left with segregated conversations and preferential treatment to user input source (why are Twitter users on the bottom, is it because it’s mostly RT broadcasts? We need functionality to distinguish these tweets from more direct comments).I’d like conversations to be unbiased based on their source, and connected to wherever the commenter wishes to put them. 140byte messages can be just as valuable as longer formats and should be able to thread in and out seamlessly with other comment sources.

         1. If the tweet is really a comment, then it belongs in the stream. But most often its not and that’s why echo’s approach doesn’t work for me

            1. So how do you know which is which- the commingling can be either really bad or really good depending on what is said?

            2. We need filtering of ‘social mentions’. It can be done but nobody has done it. We also need a time stamp on all of those social mentions so we can keep the chronology of the conversation as it expands out from this blog. We’re getting there. A year ago nobody was even aggregating the extended conversation

      3. Fred, you know, many comments threads list trackbacks in real time in between comments, and as you said commingling doesn’t make sense.

4. I moved to Disqus a while back, and I can’t wait to see this go live for me, too. There’s been a good bit of innovation (ex: JS-Kit) in this space recently, and I’m glad to see Disqus isn’t standing still.

5. I’ve tried IntenseDebate (natural fit for wordpress) and also Disqus. To be honest, I wasnt too happy with them both – I finally switched to Posterous.com – which for me does something important – allows me to reply via email rather than visit the site. I know ID and Disqus may have these features… but I like it simple. Saves time.Looking at the new style… its much more cleaner! I like it…

   1. disqus invented reply via email. they launched v1 with that feature two years ago. everyone else, including posterous copied it from them

      1. Which is why I ‘liked’ Disqus. I was just checking out the new video ofDisqus 3 as I write… looks like a long awaited update!

      2. And we just copied this feature this week! Email is old school, but it still has legs.http://www.rateitall.com/wt…

         1. Good work. Its a great feature. I asked for it when they were building disqus during YC

         2. Email may be old school… but its one that still works! How else would companies like Blackberry make money!?

      3. vbulletin had reply by email many years ago via their open source community, but that has been discontinued (the developer abandoned it). i think there are some other open source social CMSes that had reply by email before as well.

         1. Well I never experienced it until disqus built after I requested it. It is a killer feature in my book

            1. no doubt it is a killer feature. i wish the vbulletin developer had maintained it, although i will probably invest in resuming it for vbulletin in the near future. definitely a game changer.

         2. yeah… I have a vague memory… but ur right I think vbulletin had it a long time back…

      4. Fred, I am a bit blurry about timing here. But my impression is that Haloscan had it for longer than two years? In any case this is a monster feature, especially when out contribution on the web is so fragmented.

6. I think this is a MUCH better interface/UI/UX! Thanks for getting it up on your blog for all to see!

7. Disqus should do badges like Foursquare does for offline activity. I have always thought that this sort of game play increases user engagement.

   1. Daniel has mentioned game play elements to me in the past. I’m sure he’s thinking about it

   2. i think the badges need to be specific to the community. maybe disqus can do this, but i think there will be solutions better positioned to deliver this — specifically solutions that are more niche and culture oriented rather than a pure technology play. JMHO of course

8. Jealous 🙂

9. I dig it. I like the how it connects people better. I dig the drop down to peoples social graph. Improved social connectors. Well done!

10. is it possible to search all disqus comments for a particular topic, in one central place? not blog specific, but rather, here are all the blogs/discussions going on about ‘music’ or ‘health care’. that would lead me to blogs and comment streams that i might not find otherwise.

    1. Its on the roadmap

11. It looks really nice. Seems to blend in well. I like the way the twitter user images look.For just a couple of people, disqus sure gets a lot sh*t done.

    1. Yup. They are the epitome of lean and mean

12. I’m VERIFIED! I”‘m really verified! (Twitter doesn’t believe I’m me, so I’m loving Disqus even more.But am I missing something: where’s the “tweet this comment” option?

    1. Disabled right now. It’ll be back soon. Promise. 🙂

       1. Daniel – Ah thank you! It’s a great feature for us Twitter addicts. 🙂

       2. Daniel, there is big green box telling a user when he is logged in that he is “verified”. I don’t see a point of that, you are telling me that I am “verified”? Thank you.

    2. It will be back. They are rolling out the features over the next couple days here

13. looks and feels great – responsive as well 🙂

    1. It doesn’t refresh the page anymore to record a comment. That is probably the number one improvement in my book

14. I need this thing to grow on me and I don’t know about technology under the hood but my first impression is that graphically this is a step in the wrong direction. I am more of a minimalist. Perhaps there is a setting to disable reply and like buttons with text?

15. I enjoy Disqus, so i’m just testing!

16. Checking out the new disqus commenting engine…

17. I typically read all comments at this blog, however for some blogs – especially coder/technical blogs, and blogs with hundreds of comments – it would be nice to be able to search the comments for specific terms or the names of posters.One example: Jeff Master’s tropical/hurricane blog at wunderground.com (which is required reading for all of us Floridians) sometimes has hundreds of comments, and is sometimes just impossible to parse… could Disqus enable some sanity to be created there?

    1. Yes. Its starting to become an issue here to be honest

    2. Without giving too many surprises away, expect this soon.

       1. That will change the game. I look forward to seeing it.

18. This may or may not have anything to do with v3, but it took a while for the login graphics to appear, so I was at first confused as to how I would log in. I could see the text instructing me to log in, but no other clues for a while. I have been registered with DISQUS for quite a while, but haven’t used it enough to notice anything new.

19. Hi

20. Thanks for highlighting this Fred.Just to clarify, this part isn’t wholly Disqus V3. This is a new (optional) theme as part of the new release. Yep, you can choose whether to enable this or not.Some of the changes are cosmetic, but most are not. A few of the major features built into this theme is not enabled yet, but we’re mostly doing a live test on this blog — especially since we love hearing the nice and not-as-nice things the readers of avc.com have to say… :)So please test and try to break as much as you can.Availability is still slated for next week.

    1. Love the new look. I think it lets any blog to have a more “socnet”-like appearance. Is this being rolled out as a limited-beta? How do I get this turned on for my blog?

21. Would there be too much script involved (or a cross domain thing) to enable jpeg / headline / thumbnail grabs from urls – like you see in facebook? It would make for one hell of a visual debate platform.

    1. Nope, not too much.And it’s like you’re reading my mind! Hang on tight, but I will say it’s not going to make this next release.

       1. That’s nice to hear… let me also suggest (when you have the strength to turn the corner) global user disqus cred rankings… so that when a user comes into a new blog, he’s got cred for him or against him. You could weight it to favor FB more than twitter, towards being a real human. FB owns the identity space, you should own the credibility space.

          1. Not all of us are that competitive.. and a question that I have yet to see resolved, exactly how do the credibility points end up transferring from space to space when it comes to comment ranking?

             1. I don’t know about site specific rankings / topic rankings, my goal is to give people a reputation they can carry with them from site to site. I don’t imagine it bluntly competitive, like twitter followers, but more to encourage people to to take care of how they speak in the space they find themselves.In real life, words don’t just speak for themselves, the speakers reputation matters. Those aren’t built out of air, but out of real connections in a credibility economy. Disqus lets someone unify their identity across multiple domains, reputation seems like a natural extension.

             2. Correct. The question is how to build credibility without having it turn brutally competitive (as apposed to all in good cheer) and overly narcissistic. It’s one of the reasons I am not so happy about seeing how many comment likes total I have immediately on commenting. Now I keep wondering who likes me and why, and when did it get that way. Or if I have to do something to keep that going…or will it disappear if I am in a bad mood, and need a vacation?Those sorts of issues affect the transference issues. How do you keep the good aspects, without letting the negative pull it aside. (Ie my likes must mean something, I’d like to redeem them, but I don’t want to destroy them in a stupid move)

             3. That’s an interesting topic actually. The whole points thing is not that transferrable or useful. Some blogs have a habit of giving points for everything while others don’t. It makes cross comparisons or transferrability not that useful since sites don’t have similar standards. Also, points on a gardening site don’t translate into cred on a stock blog, or at least it has no meaning to do so.If I was personally going to implement this, I’d try to accumulate points by blog, as they are really not meaningful in a transferrable way.The way I see points is as an indication of:a) history length of the user at the blogb) a semi-quality rating to see if the user has recognition/cred with the local blog audienceSort of a was this acct created yesterday or is it established here is what I use it to check. Accumulating points across sites actually makes that harder to tell within the context of a specific blog.Global rankings don’t really mean anything, as it is just a marker of spammers and people would do silly things like register bots to follow them around and post up all their spam. At a blog I frequent (slopeofhope) we once had a vicious spammer who among other things downrated every post for a few months or so. They can do that in an upward direction too. If you ranked users globally somebody would show up with a billion points in a month or two.

          2. Great last phrase. That’s a nice vision there

22. testinghttp://www.youtube.com/watc…

23. I like the Reactions feature. Very useful.

24. Very cool – I wish I could put Disqus on my blog (it’s WordPress blog, but is MU / multi-user platform, hosted by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society – and I guess the MU platform doesn’t come with all the usual WP bells and whistles, or else it’s a Berkman thing, not sure)…

    1. There’s a hack you can use to attach disqus to the bottom of just your postsThey do it for me at alleyinsider when they pick up my postsBut its a hack. Probably not something you want to deal with

       1. Interesting – thanks for the info! I can’t get into the ‘guts’ of my blog template enough to do anything (if I could, I’d probably screw it up anyway), but that’s good to know, in case I’m ever involved with any other MUs.

25. Test comment for the new Disqus V3.1st edit after 1st create of the comment – good to see edit is still there. thought for a moment it was gone, as didn’t see the page refresh with my entered comment for a bit.Why the 2 scroll bars to the right of the edit comment textbox? Could things not be managed with one only? Maybe a good reason, just wondering.2nd edit. Edit box is still there on my comment, allowing me to edit it, even after 15 minutes. Interesting. Thought last time I used it (on another Fred post) that it was only for 5 mins. Now longer / unlimited?

26. Let’s see if this works; apparently it works fine.

27. As odd as this seems, I don’t want to know how many people like me. It makes me feel vain. I want to cut that out of myself.

28. Neat. I’m looking forward to seeing v3 in all its glory

29. This is a purely test comment, I want to see the internal functional design rather than participate in any kind of discussion, as well as take some notes for blogging purposes Note 1: My computer has decided to display the time in spanish. Note two, Unless I refresh, My immediate comment goes to the top of the page, reasons why? There is a lot of whitespace, and it still doesn’t immediately echo the blog’s design. Note three, what is with the buttons. Note four, apparently clicking on the In: Reply links take you to the original comment. Note 6 There seem to be no major internal changes on the website side..Note 7 why is there a scrollbar in the edit field, or two of them rather.

    1. You missed Note 5

30. Thanks for Info

31. hell yea, you guys rock

32. just testing the new Disqus comment version on AVC blog.

33. I find having the Disqus engagement encouraging. It facilitates comments. Kudos.

34. test

35. Good idea, I thought it was just me.

36. test testing

37. test

    1. I’ve got your test right here….

       1. thanks…but what is so cool about this exactly….so far same old same old. I could do without the smooth scrolling….

38. Howdy-doo!

39. k

40. ok

41. Something tells me we’re not in Kansas anymore.

    1. nope!

    2. Not for me….still in Kansas

       1. Heh…there’s one in every crowd.

42. ==

    1. hey DYNAMO!

       1. hey Moo… we working now?

          1. I need more data to answer. THanks!

43. Looks the same to me as the old one. Bit of Ajax and what not but more importantly hopefully the backend is sorted out.

    1. totally agree.

44. bacon

45. Test

46. I like this

47. Testing

48. This could be fun.

49. Not sure I like the repositioning of “flag,” “reply,” and “edit”. That “flag” seems awfully easy to hit accidentally, and “reply” less convenient than before. I think that flagging a comment should be out of the way enough to ensure it is clearly deliberate. Thoughts?

    1. I don’t mind it too much. It’s a bit close to the drop down menu of twitter and blogs etc but not too bad. I don’t actually click those all that often. I think the flag thing feels out of place mainly because it’s where the old reply used to be, I’m sure I’ll get used to it in the new place in time.I do like the in-reply-to-X addition as sometimes long response threads become annoying to find the source on.Note: the “edit” button is a little weird. It has 2 scrolling textboxes (ie, 2 vertical scroll bars) one inside the other.

       1. Hi Sky– the thing that bothers me about the “Flag” placement is that people read and type from left to right, which to me makes the left-hand side immediately under the comment the most logical and natural place to begin a reply (and to therefore have a Reply button.) I’ll be interested to see if this seems counter-intuitive to anyone else. I see your point on the “edit” button– not sure why that was changed.

          1. I think the double box in the edit thing is just an unintended bug.On a side note, if dev’s are listening I’d like the ability to edit posts after they’ve been replied to. Sometimes you want to post something for a limited amount of time… like say an email addr or sensitive information you don’t want up forever. The people it’s for post to say they got it and boom, you’re stuck unless you can get a moderator. I’ve had several things I would’ve liked to post but didn’t because I had no guaranteed way to remove them later.Maybe make the edit after a reply thing an option for the blog host to enable/disable?

             1. That’s a fair point and we’ll definitely consider it.

          2. I agree that the flag link might be a common unintentional click. I’m sure it can easily be tracked to see if there are more flagged comments than before, especially if they are getting evaluated randomly.

    2. i agree with your comments, definitely about the position of the flag link as well.

    3. Good point about the flag button, but I think it’s confusing right now because it takes over the old ‘Reply’ link position. User habits are hard to change, but they will eventually change if it’s for the better.As for the reasoning behind the move, we’re experimenting with this philosophy: people read from left to right, and subsequently end up on the right-hand corner when they finish reading and are ready for a reply. And if you didn’t read the comment in the first place, why reply?Nothing is set in stone (I like saying that) and we’re going to see how it plays out.

50. So… hears where everyone is 😉

    1. Does this mean I have to install the new Disqus upgrade at all of my sites? That’s going to be a lot of work__uh oh!–oh wait, I haven’t installed the last upgrade yet–Haha I skipped a step!

51. TEEEESTTTTTTTTTTTTT

52. short gs short gs short gs short gs…ok lets post this

53. Hmmm posts still dissapearing

    1. I finally installed Google Chrome at Moo’s nudging and it took care of this. Might want to give it a shot if you haven’t already.

54. hello

    1. haaaayyy

55. I visited with Daniel Ha today and saw this; terrific.

    1. Hi Tim– well, after just commenting a little bit ago that the new “flag” placement is problematic for me, I just flagged you when trying to reply (oops!) I was given the opportunity to then click “never mind”, but in addition to being used to the old “reply” placement, that’s just a logical place to begin typing a reply, no? (left to right, the natural order of reading, typing…) Otherwise, the refresh feature seems great– are there other upgrades not immediately obvious?

56. testing

57. test

58. Fred might be wondering where all these people came from??

    1. I am. Do tell

59. Test

60. Just wanted to test as well.

61. testing 1-2-3

62. Do you still need to be using advanced templates to install Disqus? Would love to revert to using it for comments, but have dropped advanced templates to simplify life 🙂

    1. Sadly you still need advanced templates. Typepad is not making it easy to use disqus

63. Disqus V3 seems quite nice. What are the main differences between this, IntenseDebate and JS-kit’s Echo?

    1. Without getting too much into the weeds, Disqus is a truly comprehensive, platform-agnostic system, particularly well suited for sites with substantial volume and/or an emphasis on high quality conversation. Not to say other apps out there don’t share or strive for some of these things, but I think overall that’s the biggest difference.More specifically–as will be more prevalent in V3–“Disqus Comments” and “Disqus Profile” are specifically tailored and have been ‘super-charged’ for their end users (site managers and commenters, respectively). e.g. Within the former, highly robust, efficient moderation tools are a major focus, and with the latter, you’ll see a much more unified way for users to integrate seamlessly with their various social platforms and commenting identities, and significantly greater control of one’s own comments across the web.

       1. Ok. I’ll give it a try when it’s live.

64. testing new version! 🙂

65. The “tweet this comment” is no longer here?

    1. It will be back any day now

66. Kudos on a nice job with V3. Any idea when it is going to be released? I had to drop Disqus from my site due to the word “comments” disappearing from my post page, and the comment count # disappearing from the front page (even after checking the box in advanced settings). I was just getting ready to switch to something else, but would love to see if V3 takes care of it.

    1. This week I think

       1. Sweet. Thanks for the reply.

67. Nice.

68. I like the new design. Kudos. From a usability standpoint, I would like to see a simple visual connector between a post and a sub-post to show the relationship. The multiple indents can be a bit hard to track with just white space. But it would need to be very subtle to keep from killing the clean look. Maybe a very light gray. In the long run, it would be nice to expand and collapse sections of a thread.Also, the visuals that show the source of the post (twitter, etc.) are small and hard to distinguish. If you’re going to separate by source anyway, you might think about a small heading at the beginning of each source. Not sure yet how I feel about separating by source. If it were easy enough to visually distinguish between sources (like a different color), I might prefer to keep all sources “in line” and just visually skip a source I’m not interested in (i.e. twitter retweets).But overall, I think the new look is great. Can’t wait for the final version.

69. Disqus rolled out the new web site today. Very impressive change!

70. test

71. test

72. Dear Daniel,It is officially driving me crazy.Stop telling me how many people like me when I open up a form, I’m getting vain and curious who those people are, and I think it is psychologically bad for me. I don’t want to know how many comments I have posted. I just want to go on and see that I have commented. It’s making me nervous that perhaps I am not a good commentator. (Not that I know what makes for a good commentator)Stop making me nervous please…Thanks so muchShana

73. Nice of Disqus to have found the ‘ switch’ I’d say 🙂 As ‘ V3’ has improved by a 180 radius ! There were no issues pertaining to its installation concerning ‘ advanced template mode’ ( at least for me ) -however , there may be a difference w/ certain Platforms as far as installation goes ( since I am presently on the Blogger platform ) . I must say though : the overall improvements are nice & the new version is sleek , looks great on any page 🙂

74. Still smoothing them out.

75. Your links froze the page for me– had to close and re-launch. Will try a different test link above.