Comment Systems Comparison Review: Disgusted With Disqus

A couple of weeks ago, I thought I would take the initiative towards making the comment system here more socially accessible. With their rising popularity and the great social features available with Intense Debate and Disqus, it made sense to put the default WordPress comment system on the back burner. I thought it would also be helpful to test, review, and compare the Intense Debate, Disqus, and WordPress comment systems prior to settling on one or the other. As I pointed out in my previous post, I had a great experience with Intense Debate but it’s lacking some of the social features that Disqus possesses.

Pre-installation Troubleshooting
I had previously attempted to install Disqus about a year ago but I ran into some errors and was unable to complete the installation at that time. After updating and reactivating the plugin this time around, I ran into another problem. My blog was associated with my old Disqus account and before I could use Disqus on my website I needed to remove that association. Disqus allows you to ameliorate that issue by clicking on the “Delete this website” link under the admin settings within your Disqus account. Unfortunately, after doing that, a message appeared saying it would take up to 48 hours for my website to be removed. I patiently waited and after a couple of days I sent an email to Disqus support. I received a reply from them another day later explaining that they had encountered a bug that was preventing the removal of my site but the problem was fixed now. I tried again with no avail and promptly contacted @disqus via Twitter. A couple of hours later I was able to have someone at Disqus remove the site associated with my old Disqus account.

Multiple Post-installation Issues
Despite the difficulty I had already encountered, I was elated to get Disqus up and running on my blog. The installation was simple and for the most part it went well except for the fact that some of the WordPress comments did not import into Disqus. The next day the loading of the Disqus comment system was slowed and it was preventing my blog’s posts and pages from loading completely. I sent a Twitter message to @disqus shortly thereafter and the error seemed to be corrected within a few hours. The following day I received a comment notification but couldn’t find the comment. I quickly realized that they must have had javascript blocked from loading in their browser when commenting as I found the comment within the default WordPress comment system. Disqus should have imported that comment but for some unknown reason it failed to do so. One other issue I found while investigating this problem was that, while Disqus was in use, the comment permalinks didn’t work. That is, when I would click on a comment notification or manually enter the comment permalink into the browser, it would navigate to that particular post but would not take me to that specific comment’s location (e.g. post-permalink/#comment-463). In contrast this function works correctly using the default WordPress comment system as well as Intense Debate.

When Enough Is Enough
The final straw that caused me to remove Disqus occurred last night when I realized that for some unknown reason Disqus was breaking/redirecting away from my posts as the Disqus comment system loaded. Interestingly, this problem was only present when loading of some of the posts. Initially I thought the culprit was the Google Friend Connect toolbar which might have been conflicting with some frame breaking script I had previously installed. After removing the Friend Connect toolbar, however, the problem remained. Finally, I deactivated Disqus and the breaking/redirecting of the posts stopped. I still don’t know why Disqus was causing this to occur, nor do I know why it only happened on certain posts and not others. Needless to say, I’m not going to be using Disqus anymore.

What Was Old Is New Again
Today I’m right back where I started with my native WordPress commenting system. I’ve recently heard that the Facebook Connect feature will soon be available to all Intense Debate users. While it’s tempting to reactivate ID, I think I’m going to stick with what I have for right now. Although I didn’t encounter any such problems with Intense Debate, I don’t want to have to worry about comments not synchronizing between the two comment systems and I don’t like the idea of my blog’s loading time being at the mercy of an external source that I cannot control. From here on, I’m going to be working towards improving the social friendliness of the WordPress comment system as it is still the best and most stable solution currently available.

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