Top 6 Reasons To Install Disqus 2012 on your Blog Right Now

Commenting Systems have changed! Let me give you killer top 6 reasons to install disqus 2012 on your blog at the earliest. Recently you would have seen that we have moved to a new commenting platform i.e. Disqus.

Many regular readers, might have noticed that earlier we were using Facebook comments and the native WordPress commenting system. We had a lot of complications from the former arrangement, and i lie you not, we had to use 7 WordPress plugins totally, for just powering comments. From Subscribe to comments plugin to Commentluv, most of these plugins were simply hogging my server space and increasing my blog load time.

Finally i decided to switch to Disqus 2012, because i had been hearing a lot of good reviews lately. And as a result, i can proudly say that my Google Pagespeed score is now 92/100 which is a whopping increase from 86. My website is now faster than 80% of all the tested websites on the internet, and i don’t even use a CDN.

So back to Disqus, you see choosing the right commenting platform also requires a lot of research. From the many likes of Intensedebate, Livefyre and Facebook comments itself, i went with Disqus and here are 5 reasons that will tell you why!

Maybe you haven’t heard but the new Disqus 2012 is fully SEO compatible. Earlier Disqus wasn’t SEO supported because it was using javascripts to power up the comments but the new interface is based on iframes, which load faster and can be crawled by Google bots and other search engines too!

Disqus 2012 brings your comments in realtime. Everything happens in front of your eyes. For example, when you post a comment and your friend replies to that comment 1 second later, you will see your friend’s comment appear at that instant, unless you have enabled moderation. One other thing i got to witness while commenting on Disqus 2012 is whenever you are browsing through comments, you will sometimes notice “Another user is typing”, which tells you how transparent commenting on Disqus really is!

This is one of the major reasons i opted to go with Disqus, you can login through Facebook and Twitter easily, and start commenting on any blog which is powered by Disqus. The interface gives you easy login options whenever you are about to make a comment. Commenting without logging in is also supported, a feature which is seriously missing in other commenting platforms.

Additionally you can share the whole thread or a specific comment on Facebook and Twitter as well, just click on the Share button below a comment and choose your favorite social network. You can also click the link button to copy the permalink of that comment and share it to anywhere.

Disqus uses a smart algorithm to bring the best comments out first and keep the spam at bay. I am of course, talking about the voting features. Say you like a comment, simply click on the up button and that comment will move up the list. Discussions are by default, sorted by Best i.e. popular comments rank higher.

So when a person votes down due to use of abusive language, you can delete that comment and it helps you notice spammy comments easily. You can also change this option to sort comments by Newest or Oldest in the Admin settings. Disqus also helps you star discussions so that people will know how much likes a thread is gaining.

Disqus interface brings you your community at your fingertips. With just a click you can see all the discussions happening in your blog and who are the top commentators on your site. Just switch on to the Community tab, and take a look which conversations are trending. This will also help you know which person is the most loyal reader of your blog and who indulges with you the most!

You can trace all the virality your blog post is gaining from the Reactions tab. People mentioning your post on Twitter, sharing your content on Facebook can be easily tracked back from this tab. As of writing this post, Disqus revealed us with the Discovery box. Discovery box is a good way to recommend your  readers to read other content from your blog after they have finished commenting. This helps keeping people engaged and thus increases your pageviews.

Subscribing to a thread was very difficult earlier. I had to use this plugin called Subscribe to comments, just to put a box under the comments to make people subscribe to my post. The new Disqus makes subscribing very easy, you can subscribe by email or rss just by clicking the drop down box beside the star button.

This is not it! Remember Disqus 2012 is still in Beta, there are loads of other features which will be added very soon. This doesn’t mean you are not allowed to try out the new Disqus. You can request for an invite to try out Disqus 2012 by navigating to this page. I have been using it since the last 2 days and i have encountered no bugs so far. The Final version is supposed to release later this month.

If you aren’t yet inspired, try this statement posted by the Disqus team on its invite page “We’re working on something big… comments may never be the same again.”