Goodbye Disqus, Anonymous Commentators – Welcome Back!

Well my experiment with Disqus has come to an end after a few months of using their comment system on my blog. Overall I found that the number of comments I received actually went up, but I also found that I had to deal with a lot more issues with comments not being posted. I finally decided to throw in the towel when I did a post earlier this week that got over 80 comments but also lost a ton due to some kind of comment overload.

Still I’m a case study kind of guy so I thought, why not share what I learned with everyone else so you can make the decisions yourself. So first, here’s what I liked about Disqus:

  • Ability to respond to comments and have the response appear in-line, very cool!
  • Advanced options for access control – great to get rid of comment spammers
  • Awesome support – the people at Disqus rock, definitely a good company

Now for the bad:

  • Annoying to get logged-out of my own comment system when in my dashboard
  • By not allowing anonymous commentators I lost a few really great people (not Disqus’s fault here of course)
  • Problems publishing a high-volume of comments
  • Confusing for people – Disqus just isn’t used on many blogs so people aren’t used to dealing with it

So there you have it. A great test, and an interesting adventure but I can tell you I’m already feeling much better with good ol’ normal WordPress comments. My original reason behind adding Disqus was to get rid of anonymous commentators, however through the whole experience I realized, heck, if you want to be anonymous, be anonymous.

For years I have said “Comment and let your voice be heard” and now I mean it more than ever. So come one come all, share your opinion, good or bad and join in the discussion. We’ve got an exciting year ahead of us!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton