Disqus is getting a whole lot more attractive to publishers today with the rollout of several new features designed to make the third-party commenting system function much more like one native to popular blogging platforms.
While Disqus has attracted more than 30,000 websites to its system, its biggest drawback to-date has been the fact that its commenting system functioned essentially like a widget, meaning comments were not stored locally. This meant that publishers who installed the service could not migrate their old comments, needed to login to Disqus for moderation, and lost the SEO benefits of having comment content on their site.
To begin to address these issues, Disqus is launching a new WordPress plugin and enhanced developer API. With the plugin, comments can now be synced with a local database, and publishers can import their old comments into Disqus. Additionally, comments can now be moderated from within the WordPress Admin, as they are with the standard WordPress commenting system.
With comments now being stored server side, it means they are indexable by search engines, in turn negating the SEO problem created in previous iterations of Disqus. As for the API, the idea is to allow developers to create their own custom integrations, allowing the comment system to serve audiences beyond those on blogs.
So do all these enhancements make Disqus worth switching to if you haven’t yet jumped on the bandwagon? Before today, the big selling point was that the service increases engagement, because people are more likely to leave comments when they have ownership of them (i.e. - with a Disqus account, all your comments from across the Web are stored at disqus.com/yourname). Looking to take this idea a step further, another big enhancement being released today by Disqus involves making profile pages much more blog-like, as you can see in the screenshot below:
Up next for Disqus: a much requested integration with Friendfeed, so comments left on the social aggregator will be streamed back to the originating blog, similar to the feature the service already offers through Plaxo.
Disqus clearly realizes that comments are owned by the bloggers producing the content and the people engaging with it. They're also showing the beauty of hosted applications - solving big problems for bloggers that get implemented in real-time without any effort on our part. Today’s enhancements solidify these ideas, and should lead more big publishers to seriously consider the platform.