Big Changes in the Comment System

If you’ve been a long time reader or commentator of Menstrual Poetry, you may have noticed that a while ago, we had a big change when it came to the comment system. While debates tend to break out between commentators due to the nature of most of the topics I write about, I wanted to implement a comment system that would allow people to debate with one another without having to go searching for their comment and the replies to the comment they left, so I installed Intense Debate, a comment system that seemed to be exactly what I was looking for at the time as far as threaded comments went and allowing people to debate within the comment system–I mean hello, the name of the system was Intense Debate! I ended up using Intense Debate for a month or so and then realized when another hot debate broke out between people in the comments, threaded comments wouldn’t go beyond one reply to a comment, which if you’ve debated or conversed with other commentators in a post, you know that there is never an instance where you leave one reply to a comment and that’s the end of it; you need to be able to have an ongoing conversation with people about a topic, it’s just the way it is. I had a myriad of other problems with Intense Debate that honestly, I forget now but remember that my friend Ally from Take Me Nowhere had the same problems with the system. Ally, upon requesting help from their customer support when she tried to uninstall Intense Debate but repeatedly received error messages upon exporting her comments, received nothing back for quite some time and then after she received emails back from them, realized that they were simply giving her the run around and blaming her for their obvious flaw in the system. The customer support debacle between the two of them got rather nasty throughout the month it took them to get back to her and ultimately left her with no other option than to manually go through hundreds of comments and put them back into the system with absolutely no help from Intense Debate’s disgusting attempt at customer support. I ended up having the exact same problems with the system as she did and while I emailed their customer support upon receiving their infamous error messages, I just never received anything back from them, leaving me no options but to manually go through all of my comments and manually put them back in and resort back to the standard WordPress comment system.

From that point forward I have been using the standard WordPress comment system and while it has worked fine, I still had that hole in my comment system where commentators couldn’t debate or reply to comments left by other people. While surfing around the web yesterday I came across a lovely little comment system called Disqus. Having never heard of it before, I read the testimonials on their site and also did some other research on the program and couldn’t find one horrible review, so I installed it here and that is the comment system you can now see on Menstrual Poetry.

I am really excited about Disqus because it has threaded comments like Intense Debate did, but unlike Intense Debate, there is no limit to the amount of times you can reply to a comment, it will just thread along forever if need be. Disqus also makes it easier for you to moderate your comments by putting a tab right in the comments section of WordPress that lets you easily manage comments and opens the Disqus tabs immediately, eliminating that extra click it would take in order to open the Disqus comment manager.

In case you haven’t had the opportunity to check out the new comment system, I suggest you take a gander and also leave a comment. An icon will show up if you have either a Gravatar or profile on Disqus that will also track all comments you make on sites that have their comment system on their sites. It also has another cool feature that I like a whole bunch. If you’ve noticed little up and down arrows next to someone’s icon in the comments you can click up to give their comment a point if you really love what they have to say or you can click down if you think their comment serves no purpose, you don’t agree with it and so on. Not only that, but if a comment has -4 points (on this site, anyway, it can be changed and varies on other sites using Disqus) the comment will not even be shown; it’s very digg-like.

I have missed a lot of awesome features in this pseudo review, so here is a screenshot of what my Disqus manager looks like:

When it comes to your site’s comments, everything can be moderated and tweaked through Disqus and it’s a pretty rad system, I like it.

I have had one problem with Disqus, however. After importing my old comments from WordPress into Disqus so I wouldn’t lose any comments I had prior to the installation, the system decided which comments it was going to import leaving a lot of old posts without any comments and quite a few posts with just some of the comments imported. While all comments are still in my WordPress comment log, they don’t seem to want to show up on the site now for the public, so if you’ve noticed this problem and wondering what’s going on, please be relieved to know that I am aware of the problem and have wrote to their support about it. This brings up another huge plus about Disqus.

Within an hour (if that) of writing to their support about the issue I’m having with the comments, Daniel Ha, the cofounder of Disqus emailed me back to say that he was looking into the matter. I Twittered the problem that I was having after I had sent the email and just in case I checked Twitter before my email, like I did, Daniel Ha also sent me a tweet saying that he responded and that all was well. Obviously Disqus knows a thing or two about support and actually helping out and looking into the problems its users have during the process of setting up their commenting system. I am fully confident that my problem will be fixed and if not, I’ll find another way around it. I am thoroughly impressed by their support and by their program, obviously.

So thank you, Disqus, not only for the totally rad commenting system, but also for the excellent support and dedication you show for your creation. You’re pretty rad in my book.

I hope everyone likes and haves fun with the comments now, I’ll also be replying to comments made on this site a lot more, so count on seeing me communicate a bit more with everyone, which is always nice.