We transitioned away from Disqus way back in 2015. Lots of our readers noticed this change and asked us to share our thoughts on why we switched.
After using Disqus for about a year, we identified several drawbacks that prompted our decision to switch back to the default WordPress comments. Today, this is still our preferred choice.
Now, we use the default WordPress commenting system alongside the Subscribe to Comments Reloaded plugin. This way, our readers can follow certain posts and conversations that interest them most.
In this article, we will explore the reasons behind our decision and how it led to a 304% increase in our comment engagement.
Why Did We Switch Away from Disqus?
At WPBeginner, we started using Disqus in April 2014.
However, just a year later, we decided to switch away from Disqus. Let’s go over some of the reasons why we decided to make the switch.
Inserting Affiliate Links without Permission
When we were using Disqus, it offered publishers the opportunity to earn a little extra money if they enabled Promoted Discovery. This enabled sponsored stories in the related posts section that Disqus could add.
Since we didn’t want any advertisements from them, we had all the settings unchecked.
However, we accidentally encountered what they called a “bug” in which Disqus inserted affiliate links into our blog post content without our permission.
Basically, Disqus had a partnership with Viglink, which looks through your content and changes any link that they’re partnered with to an affiliate link.
We caught this when we noticed Viglink referring sales to OptinMonster from our site, WPBeginner. How ironic since both of them are our sites. Hmmm.
After looking into it, we reported the problem to Disqus, which they fixed, calling it a “bug.”
We were quite disappointed in the way this was handled. We’re not sure how much money Disqus made through this affiliate injection bug and how widespread this was.
There was no public disclosure announcement about this, and we definitely didn’t get any $$ credit for advertising they placed on our site for who knows how long. That just left a bad taste in the mouth.
Sponsored Comments
We learned this from our friend Michael Hyatt, who noticed sponsored comments appearing on his site without permission.
He reported that you couldn’t opt out without assistance from the Disqus Support team. So, we contacted Disqus for an official response.
They confirmed that there was no easy way for individuals to opt out without reaching out to their support team. However, they noted that due to specific criteria for Sponsored Comments, most users would not be affected.
Nonetheless, managing spam comments was already challenging, and monitoring Disqus to ensure they didn’t enable sponsored comments on our site added to the workload. These additional tasks became too much.
Note: During this sponsored comments fiasco, we discovered a setting that was auto-enabled for cookie tracking. At the time, it was located in the ‘Advanced’ settings tab. So, if you’re using Disqus, you’ll want to check if this feature still exists and disable it.
Significant Decrease in Comment Engagement
When we used Disqus, a few readers complained that it made guest commenting harder. Since Disqus was widely used across several top sites, we didn’t pay much attention to those complaints at first.
However, over time, our comment engagement dropped significantly. After disabling Disqus, we saw that our users were starting to leave more comments. Soon after the change, we noticed our comments increased by 304%.
Moderation Interface
When we switched to Disqus, we were initially quite excited about the new comment moderation interface. But, as we used it more, it wasn’t something our editors liked.
Note: This is completely a personal preference, and we know there are other users who love the Disqus interface.
What Did We Like About Disqus?
Despite some concerns with Disqus’ business practices, there were several features we appreciated about the platform.
Scalability and Site Performance
Comments are very resource-intensive. If you have a lot of comments on a post, then it will take a long time to load.
If many users leave comments at the same time, it will also impact your server load. The advantage of using a third-party commenting system like Disqus is that you can shave that server load off yours and send it their way.
Even if a malicious user attacks your site, it won’t impact your server because it has to go through Disqus first. However, please do note that this is only true if you have disabled Comment Sync.
Redundancy
The best part about Disqus was that comments were stored on a third-party database, which is extremely helpful in dealing with redundancy. We definitely miss that.
This means that if you ever have to do a fail-over, you can simply disable comments until your main servers are back. Although not ideal, this is the simplest option that you have.
Disqus Alternatives
Currently, we’re using the default WordPress comments and the Subscribe to Comments Reloaded plugin. The core software helps us streamline comment management. Meanwhile, the plugin lets our readers follow the posts they’re most interested in, which boosts engagement.
While we don’t use Thrive Comments at WPBeginner, we recommend it based on its powerful features and the positive experiences we’ve seen on the Thrive blog. It’s an excellent choice for anyone looking to enhance their WordPress comment system.
For more details, you can see our extensive Thrive Themes Suite review and go to the Thrive Comments section.
Alternatively, you can improve native WordPress comments by using a suite of additional functionality plugins that enable users to:
These are just a few examples. You can check out our expert picks of the best plugins to improve WordPress comments and find the right tool for your goals.
Related: We’ve tried Disqus and Livefyre in the past, but we’ve returned to WordPress comments because it just seems like the best overall option.
We hope this review clarifies our reasons for switching away from Disqus, thank you for your continued interest and understanding. For further reading, you may like to see our guide on how to manage WordPress comment notification emails or how to export email addresses from WordPress comments.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
Jim
Disqus does have some significant positives. The biggest one is that a lot of people use Disqus so they don’t have to go through the hassle of registering on your website. They are already registered with Disqus so they are good to go.
For a new or moderate size website that is a huge positive. WPBeginner is a very well established website, I can see where they don’t need a service like Disqus.
I’ve tried using the Wordpress commenting system on several websites and Disqus has outperformed the Wordpress commenting system by many times.
Another nice advantage to Disqus is that it will send you traffic. Whenever I look at my site analytics there is some that come through Disqus. That’s nice.
Mich
I hate Disqus showing a running list of all my comments across the web, privacy breach central! What have users to gain from this?
This wpbeginner site also contains Facebook tracking, Google tracking, Gravatar widgets and OptinMonster beacons, privacy concern.
Elizabeth
Thank you! I just ran into the “bug” issue on my site! I worked on a sponsored post that asked for no affiliate links. I figured that was not a problem since I wasn’t an affiliate with them anyways. Turns out (after hours and hours of investigation) that Diqus was making it an affiliate link and sending it to an account that I had no affiliation with on Commission Junction (aka someone else was making money off the post that I wrote!) So it was all super sketch town and they are not helping me with anything in regards to fixing this “bug” so I am done with it. Thanks for this post! It was so helpful as I make this decision and made me feel a little less crazy when I noticed it on my site as well.
Thanks!
Tig
Excellent post and very timely as i’m looking into switching comment systems
From my tests with disqus (Which I do like by the way) it just seems to add too much to the site (seriously check the requests when running a site profile – a lot of disqus going on there.. too much if u ask me ..)
what are the good alternatives apart from sticking with wordpress comments?
WPBeginner Support
We currently use default WordPress commenting system. We think De:comments is a good enhancement.
Admin
Steve (JoeBugBuster) Case
As a reader, I share your observations on 3rd-party comment systems. Anything that makes it harder for me to comment means I’ll be less likely to comment. I’ve seen sites switch to Disqus or Facebook commenting, and it hasn’t helped the quality of the comments.
As a blogger, I’ve decided to stick with native WordPress commenting, with the help of the Akismet plugin that you use. (Yes, I pay for it.)
Arinze oparaugo
Disqus Is not the best option, you better stick to the default wordpress commenting system.
Joe Prism
Good advice! I’ll steer well clear of Disqus in the future.
Andrew Miguelez
I appreciate the honesty in this post. I’ve been reading through a bunch of your posts concerning WP comments and I keep having the same question:
Are you paying for Akismet?
Akismet is not free for commercial use. Many businesses who have WordPress sites use the default comment system and talk about how great Akismet is. They frequently tout its “free” cost and ease of use. So that leads me to believe that most people are not paying for it even though they are supposed to.
I know you have a post on alternatives to Akismet and may not be using it anymore, but the question remains. Have you ever paid for Akismet or did you use the free option and just wait and see what they did about it?
I want to keep my client sites simple and use default comments with Akismet, but at $5/month, that’s just unreasonable. Thanks for your response.
Steve Wilkinson
Interesting article and good warnings about things Disqus might be up to.
But, on the other hand, the WP comment system is particularly terrible in usability. For example, I just left a reply to one of the comments above. After hitting the ‘submit’ my browser was busy for a good long time and then page-refresh (so I’d lose my place if I care). With Disqus, it just places the comment.
And, while I understand the complaint about the lack of styling control, IMO, DIsqus looks better than pretty much any native style I’ve ever seen implemented… though, sure, maybe it won’t match some styles of sites.
But, the biggest reason I’m considering Disqus is the follow-up. When I leave a comment on a site, and someone replies…. simply clicking in the e-mail I get takes me RIGHT TO THE COMMENT! That’s something I miss about every other comment system I’ve seen, from the end-user perspective. Some try, Disqus is the only one I’ve seen really work very well.
That said, is the trade-off too much? If these ‘bugs’ don’t get fixed, maybe. But, I want a good comment system that actually works, and isn’t an end-user usability nightmare. It seems most of the points, besides the spam/ads, are more about the plus/minus to the site admin.
Also, I’ve heard that Disqus can be configured to not require a Disqus account. Any feedback on that? I’m not a fan of single-sign-on or forcing people to create an account, so if what I’ve heard isn’t true, that might be a deal-breaker.
But, w/o Disqus, where does that leave me? I guess folks like Postmatic, but if it’s like subscribe to comments reloaded (which I already run), I’m not that interested. That’s only a slight improvement. I just wish WordPress would get serious about making a reasonably good comment system… but much like BBS functionality, it sees like most of the ‘shiny-new’ systems have a long way to go to catch up with usability from decades ago.
Fred
Thanks for this useful article!
Paweł
Hello there!
I also switched off Disqus comment system.
It just didnt look nice with logo and some extra links at the bottom. Even when I made some change and disable that I was still getting lots of complains about “I must login in to comment”.
Now I know, WP comments system is the best. Simple as that.
Terri M., the Director
Great article. One thing I do love about Disqus is the ability to edit my comments. Sometimes I get a little over excited and mistype something. Does Postmatic (or any other comment plug-in, for that matter) allow you do correct your mistakes after submission?
WPBeginner Support
Yes there are some plugins like DeComments that allow users to edit their comments. You can also try Simple Comment Editing plugin.
Admin
Mike
You still have Disqus on your top plugins for 2015. You should take it off.
Katrina McClain
Not to mention the fact that sometimes Disqus just didn’t load. I cringe every time I see that sadistic little emblem.
Andrés
Wow, what a great conversation going on!
I tried the default WP comments, the Jetpack comments and Disqus; but now I’m a big fan of Postmatic. After years of seeing everyone leave comments on Facebook but not on the blog post page it looks like comments via email did the trick to bring people back. I’m pretty happy with it and its integration with WPdiscuz
Cendrine Marrouat
I enjoyed Disqus at the beginning. Then, something happened and comments stopped. People didn’t like the login or signup process. That’s what some told me, anyway.
Postmatic has been a wonderful plugin so far. And I love the team, as well. So responsive and supportive!
I don’t think I will ever get back to a regular commenting system.
Steve Wilkinson
From what I’ve been told, there is a setting which allows comments without login or signup. I haven’t actually tried it yet (I’m in research phase).
Danny Brown (@DannyBrown)
Just jumping back and going through the comments, it’s very telling in a couple of ways – no sight of the Disqus team to address concerns, and plenty of interaction from recommended plugin devs like Postmatic.
Says a lot, I think, and validates the move away from Disqus.
Sacha
Yes, I have had many issues with Disqus too.
I decided to enable Disqus comments on my main website which gets about 200 visits per week and many comments.
So that day I published a few articles as I always do and I started getting a several emails within hours.
Now I frequently get emails asking about the topics I cover in articles, but I’ve never had an email asking how to leave a comment. All of these emails were asking or complaining about commenting on my site. For example, one them said ‘It keeps asking me to create a ‘Disqus’ account. I don’t want any accounts, I just want to leave a comment on your site!’.
At the start I just answered them, but it was getting to the point where I would get emails whenever I published an article! I decided I was just tormenting my users and I went back to the good old WordPress comments and I haven’t had a problem since.
It really amazes me that so many websites use Disqus and I think they are low quality and sneaky.
Editorial Staff
Yup our experience was the same Sacha.
Admin
Dan
I’m in the same position, and I want to move back to WP comments. Can you guys follow up this post with one that walks you through the process? I’m totally confused as to whether I will lose my comments if I do this?
Or is it really as simple as just disabling the Disqus plugin?
Editorial Staff
Hi Dan,
Disqus automatically syncs comments with your WordPress database. However if you turned that setting off, then make sure to turn it back on. Then go to the comments area to verify that all of your comments are there.
After that, it’s as simple as disabling Disqus
Admin
Muhammad Imran
Great change, I don’t remember how many times I had wish to appreciate awesome posts of this blog but I was just closed browser windows due to disqus signin problem. But now its awesome again.
Editorial Staff
Glad to have you back Muhammad
Admin
Josh
You can add my voice to those who have been very pleased with Postmatic. It is easy to use for blogger and commenter and has had a positive impact upon my blogs.
Leo
Yes, it’s really pain the * to setup disqus, syncing, and loading especially in mobile. The worse part, there’s even unclean installation and a lot of leftover in database. So make sure you clean those upon uninstalling.
I’ve tried postmatic during it’s beta phase and impressed with the new way of commenting, but had to stop and now using wpdiscuz it’s a breeze, integrate nicely with desktop and wptouch.
Jason Lemieux
Hey Leo,
Postmatic now integrates with wpdiscuz. You can have the best of both worlds!
Adeel Sami
Wow! This puts Disqus on my not-try-things!
While it is great of offload some of the server load but the thing they called it “bug” is a flat bad!
Thanks for the insight about Disqus, I am sure gonna have to share it so it reaches to as many people as possible.
~ Adeel
Albert Albs
Try using Jetpack Comments. It has social login and many more features. And it is completely FREE.
Ahmad Awais
This is pretty bad. I used to have Disqus on my sites, until one day I disabled it due to the similar story ads they were putting inside every article. Thanks for an eye-opening article.
Bob Dunn
Well, I know it’s been said already, but I have also moved to Postmatic. And without repeating what has been said, in a nutshell, I have tried them all. A lot of them were okay but I seemed to always end up back at the basics. Have to say I’m damn impressed with Postmatic so far, more than others. I’m a happy camper. Cheers!
Dan Knauss
I second Bob on Postmatic, coupled with their Epoch plugin. I’ve been using it since the beta myself and on the public side at Tom McFarlin’s blog, which is a great working example to check out. Started rolling it out for some clients recently too. Postmatic works in combination with wpDiscuz too.
sofia
nice overview. disqus is disgusting.
Umer Iftikhar
Hi! Hmm I am feeling bad to read this post.. I didn’t know that the disqus could make money from our blogs. I am going to remove it from all of my blogs. Thanks WPBeginner. Also post about how to speed up the comment system when we have lots of comments on a page as discussed above. Thanks
Editorial Staff
Umer, the only reasonable way to speed up page with lots of comments is to either paginate comments or use Ajax comment loading.
Admin
Connor Rickett
I went through this with Livefyre a little while back. It seems like such a wonderful idea but in practice it rarely works that way. Some people loved it, some users hated it, but the overall engagement when up when I jumped back over to the vanilla WP comments. The added bonus was the drop in page load times . . . Turns out half the time my page spent loading was actually just waiting for Livefyre to get its act together.
Not to say WordPress couldn’t use a few improvements in the way they handle comments.
Dennis Freedman
I went from Disqus to Livefyre. My comments leaped through the roof. Main reason is that they bring in the twitter and Facebook comments. I have over 25k followers on those channels so instead of getting 5 comments a piece, sometimes I now get 150+
Editorial Staff
Hey Dennis, yes that was definitely a plus side of Livefyre when we used it, but what we found was that a lot of those social conversations were irrelevant (i.e people replying and asking an off-topic question).
Admin
Danny Brown
Yep, that was one of the main reasons I moved away from it. Loved he concept, but when you get a hashtag argument around a post, or tweets in a language not your own and you have no idea what’s being said (positive or negative), it can get time-consuming to monitor.
muhammad ismail
i was thinking of to start disqus.. but thanks to Wpbeginner for reviewing it.. may i know which plugin will be good for a tech blog.. Livefyre ,, commentluv … Intense Debate,, Intense Debate
or any other..
i will be thankful
Editorial Staff
Right now we’re just using native WordPress comments which has always done a great job for us
Admin
Alasdair Page
I wonder whether IntenseDebate would be a good alternative to Disqus and Livefyre. It looks good if you’re going to use WordPress’ own comments system anyway.
Pete Davenport
I have to second a vote for Postmatic. The whole email thing to comment is amazing. I’ve deployed it on several sites for clients now and everyone is thrilled with it.
I have had good luck with a combination of WPdiscuz and Postmatic. One thing Discuz does well is mimic that nice interface that Disqus has made popular across the internet. For all of Disqus’ problems, the user interface is pretty nice and the guys behind WPDiscuz have done a good job implementing the better features like comment voting and sharing. If you are keen on Disqus’ user interface, that’s an option. WPdiscuz works nicely with Postmatic and the two together are brilliant. Postmatic is the commenting feature you didn’t realize you needed until you have it.
Postmatic also recently released Epoch as an add-on to its main plugin. Epoch adds a nice ajax experience to the commenting, and quite frankly is awesome. Postmatic and Epoch are so good, that if I was Matt Mullenweg, I’d buy the company and integrate its features into WP.com by default. If you don’t need the comment voting and sharing that WPDiscuz borrowed from Disqus, then the combination of Postmatic and Epoch is a great way to go.
Editorial Staff
Thanks for the suggestion Pete — will definitely take that into account
Admin
Jason Lemieux
Dang, Pete! Those are some serious words. Thanks so much for your support and for being a brave beta tester.
Dan Knauss
That is pretty close to my experience and recommendation, but wpDiscuz has some issues with how it handles languages, and it’s interface on the WP admin is not ideal. De:comments looks like it ought to be the leader if you want all the bells and whistles; I’ve never heard of it and will definitely watch it now.
The cool core thing about Postmatic is how close it is to a fire and forget solution. It just works, and you’ll operate it ever after by email. It is ethical by default and stops you from accidentally spamming people. Transitioning from Subscribe2comments is drop dead simple, and the people behind it are right there is you need to reach out.
The claim that it will increase engagement seems absolutely true. If you have to deal with sites still using Feedburner, Feedblitz, or even Mailchimp or Jetpack to send out new posts there is a lot of friction involved. Actually you could call it punishment for your visitors. Take it away and your comments DO go up. Strangely I’ve seen a fairly dead site commentwise shift from a few cranky comments on new posts to more and better comments from engaged readers. Being able to reply and manage comments by email eases things up for everyone involved; you might see a dip in visitor stats, but I’d call that a boost in efficient resource usage and visitor engagement. They’re still getting and interacting with your content, just via email.
I’m impressed enough to think it’s going to just get better, and there’s a lot of trust Postmatic has to maintain since they’re pushing out all that mail for their users. I’m not sure how they’re doing it, but it is crazy fast. I got a Postmatic new comment email today from Tom’s blog BEFORE the form submit finished and the page refreshed.
Jackie
Thank you Syed for this great article.
I changed my Disqus comment system because of loading speed and my comments privacy. Disqus has lots of issues but it’s most professional third comment hosting by now. However, I agree with you, It makes some problems for guest commenters and it has slow loading bugs. I see some alternatives for native comment system. @Pete mentioned Wpdiscuz, Postmatic and Epoch. I know very well wpdiscuz and just want to say, that it’s not just a “native” + “comment voting and sharing”. It seems you don’t familiar with wpdiscuz plugin. It’s premium level plugin for free with dozens of very useful features. You can read those on plugin description page.
Most of my clients, partners and friends use wpdiscuz and they are more than happy. I’ve also used Facebook comments and G+ comments, but it’s time to keep my commenters and my comments private. I have 100% integrated powerful comment system with wpdiscuz, which is the best alternative by now.
I also checked the Epoch, but to tell the truth I’m not impressed, nothing special and attractive. It’s just an alternative to WP Ajaxify Comments plugin.
Bjarni Wark
Has there been an increase with spam and extra time to moderate comments since switching? Thanks for sharing too.
Tom McFarlin
Hey guys,
I’d normally leave a much longer comment than this, but my vote is for Postmatic. I’ve written three, relatively lengthy posts about my experience with them and why I use them on my site.
At the risk of coming off as if I’m promoting my own site, here’s a URL to my post on “Why I Use Postmatic For WordPress”: https://tommcfarlin.com/postmatic-for-wordpress/
It links to my other comments as well as why I enjoy using it in my work.
Good luck in choosing a new system!
— Tom
Editorial Staff
Thanks Tom — have huge respect for the work you have done, and I really appreciate the recommendation. Will surely give them a try
-Syed
Admin
Tom McFarlin
Thanks Syed – and thanks for the great content always being published here. Such a good resource for people who are getting started with WordPress.
At any rate, best of luck finding something that suits you and your teams needs. You’ve got your work cut out for you, for sure :).
X. Nkhoma
Hi Syd, we have integrated our wordpress comments with Jetpack on our site and it has all these features: Subscribe to Comments, Reply Notifications, & Simple Comment Editing. Discus is crap I think
Katharine
I used to hate discus. Then they finally let me make comments. I kept plugging away until that day came.
Y’all are smart to take them down. Yay for you! I can comment here! It’s lovely!
Editorial Staff
We’re glad to have you here Katharine and happy that we removed the barrier for you to comment
Admin
Lisa
I’ve had good results with Postmatic.
I have used it for both public facing comments and am using it for members – only comments, it has beautiful emails, and a lot of widgets that allow you to add more. Definitely worth checking out.
Editorial Staff
Thanks Lisa for sharing your experience. Really appreciate your insights
Admin
Danny Brown
Hi guys,
Not surprised you switched away from Disqus. While I enjoyed it in the early days, I found it becoming less intuitive and useful, and more about what it could do for the developers as opposed to its users. And don’t get me started on its performance when trying to comment via mobile!
I’ll unashamedly throw Postmatic into the hat as something you should seriously consider. I’ve been blogging for about 15 years now, and 7 years solidly on my main blog. I’ve tried pretty much every comment system there is: native, Disqus, Livefyre, Echo, Comments Evolved, wpDiscuz, Intense Debate, and on, and on.
Each has been missing something. Even native comments, which I’ve flirted with the most, with the exception of three years with Livefyre until last year, is lacking (the need to add extra usability to notify of follow up comments, for example). So, I was skeptical when the Postmatic guys reached out to me on Twitter to have a look at their platform. But I’m glad I did.
I wrote a post recently on why Postmatic is the only comments system I’ll use on my WordPress blog, and here are some of the points from that:
– Seamless integration with any WordPress blog. Because Postmatic uses email to reply to, and receive, new comments, your existing native WordPress comment styling isn’t touched. All that changes is you have a little box below the comments to sign up for Postmatic comment replies, and you’re good to go.
– Moderation via email. Postmatic makes it really easy to moderate via email, even when on the go. As a moderator, you can use “Approve”, “Trash” or “Spam” as a reply to a comment notification and Postmatic takes care of the rest. This is a major bonus if you don’t have time to jump into your WordPress dashboard (or third party comment system admin area) to quickly moderate spammy or abusive comments.
– Responsive HTML email for posts, comments and invitations to subscribe. Using the Postmatic Premium template, you can add your own header, end of email widgets (for promotional banners, email sign-up, or anything else you’d normally put in a WordPress widget), and footer template. This lets you have a branded email and comment reply notification that is immediately recognizable as yours – and it’s all responsive, so will look good on any display.
– Email notification throttling. If a post gets more than six comments in an hour, Postmatic will pause notifications and instead send out an email that advises the post discussion is taking off. The post commenter/subscriber then gets an option to leave it on pause and resubscribe to the conversation at a later time, or rejoin there and then. It’s a slick implementation that puts full control into the commenter’s hands – if you rejoin, you know what you might be getting yourself into. If you no longer want notifications, you won’t get them.
– Past commenter invitation. When you switch Postmatic on, you have the option of sending an email out to people who have commented on your blog before, but may have dropped off the radar. You can send a personalized invite out to those folks, advising of your switch to Postmatic and inviting them back to the conversation, with the promise of never contacting them again if they don’t reply. It’s a great way to reach out to members of your community that may have slipped out of sight.
I could go on and on, but you probably get the message. Since switching Postmatic on, my own comment numbers have increased, easily doubling and often tripling the comment count from pre-Postmatic.
Given my readers and subscribers have also praised it, and said it’s encouraged them to comment again due to the more inclusive feel of an email exchange, and as a blogger I really can’t praise the team over there enough for what they’re doing.
They’ve also just released Epoch into beta mode, which mixes Ajax-powered real-time commenting with native styling. It’s also speed and SEO-friendly, and a nice addition to Postmatic-powered blogs, though both can be used as a standalone.
OK, I’ll shut up now, as this is turning into a major Postmatic love-in. And I’m meant to be a grump Scotsman…
Seriously, though, I’d heartily recommend checking Postmatic out. It’s a blogger’s comment system made by blog lovers.
Jason Lemieux
Hey.. Thanks Danny. That does read like a Postmatic lovefest. I blush.
One point of clarity though: Postmatic *is* a native commenting system. It’s really just a dressed up version of Subscribe to Comments/Reloaded. Fully native.. just a magic email gateway. A bit more on that at http://gopostmatic.com/technology
Editorial Staff
Thanks for dropping by Jason — always great to have the founder of a company leaving comments. Kudos!
Admin
Ariel M Stallings
Hey! Nice to see another fan of Postmatic. I’m on week 2 of testing it out, and thus far have been super impressed. It’s been exciting to watch Postmatic’s tools reengage my readership.
Danny Brown
Cheers, Ariel, and yes, that seems to be the gist of conversations I’ve seen across blogs that are using Postmatic. Bloggers like Tim Bonner, Josh Wilner, etc., have all said their engagement levels are way up.
Given many bloggers live for conversation after a post, and that blog comments are meant to be “dead”, it’s been nice to watch Postmatic prove that concept more than false.
Editorial Staff
Wow thanks for the very detailed and thorough comment Danny. I talked with Jason from Postmatic and will surely keep your strong recommendation in mind
Admin
Danny Brown
No worries, and glad the comment was useful. Like I mentioned, I didn’t want my comment to be flushed with praise, but the Postmatic guys really are doing some cool stuff.
If you are interested, here are a bunch of posts I’ve written about the solution, including what features I felt it still needs (just to show it’s not 100% love, hehe).
http://dannybrown.me/?s=postmatic
Please, feel free to delete the link if it doesn’t fit with your comment policy.
Cheers again, interested to see what you eventually go with.
Chris Lovie-Tyler
Danny’s pretty much said it all, but Postmatic gets my vote as the plugin that’s most likely to reignite blog commenting.
Laurence Anthony
I’ve been around the block with several systems and I would not recommend anything other than
Postmatic. Complete game changer.
Sub and unsub via email or website.
Unsub from specific posts via email.
Invitation to sign up by replying with : agree.
Reply and post comment via email.
We even customized the email templates to suit our needs.
We use it for newsletters and discussion list like a listserv.
DJ Thistle
We’ve tried Livefyre & Disqus over at SteamFeed, I wasn’t aware of the affiliate links, but finally settled on a newer commenting system, Postmatic, that uses native Wordpress and allows users to get notifications and reply right in their email. We’ve definitely seen a significant increase in comments, and responses to comments, since we’ve made the change a few months back. Plus Jason over there has been incredibly supportive and responsive.
Editorial Staff
Thanks DJ for dropping by — I really appreciate your thoughts and feedback. Hope all is great at Steamfeed
Admin
Chris Lovie-Tyler
+1 The last sentence!
Matt Steele
I’ve always used Disqus but am thinking of switching to WP comments. The only thing holding me back is ‘losing’ all the past comments from Disqus.
Did you use a tool to import your Disqus comments into WP?
Editorial Staff
Matt, you don’t lose any past comments because Disqus syncs the comment with your database. If you had sync turned off, then you can turn it on, then sync your comments and disable Disqus.
Admin
Jason Lemieux
Hey Matt,
We have a lot of experience doing these conversions. Sometimes it doesn’t go totally smoothly and you end up with a variety of odd usernames (such as Friend, Friend1, Friend2).
If that happens to you we have a fix for it. I haven’t gotten around to releasing it yet but we have a small plugin which will regenerate usernames based on the email address for those that need it. Get in touch if you need help: @gopostmatic.
Marlena H.
I’m thrilled to hear that you have dumped Disqus. I do not have a Disqus account and I have no plans at this time to get one. I’ve considered it a few times and come to the conclusion that much as I would love to comment in some places, I am not willing to get a Disqus account to do so. This has forced me to not comment in some places and to reach out to site owners through other means if I want to let them know how much I liked something they posted about.
Editorial Staff
Thanks for leaving a comment Marlena, and we’re glad to have you here
Admin
Josh Pollock
Great article about the many perils of not controlling your data, and what it means to your business and your users.
I strongly recommend native WordPress commenting, plus Postmatic for comment subscriptions and reply via email. In addition, Postmatic has a live commenting plugin called Epoch, currently in beta, that live updates the page with new comments, including from other users.
For transparency’s sake, I’ll point out that I am paid, as a contributing developer for both of these plugins. But I use them myself, because they deliver on their promise.
Editorial Staff
Thanks for the recommendation Josh. I really appreciate it.
-Syed
Admin
Mark Sadler
Thanks for the article. I’d seen Disqus and wondered how it worked. BTW, the “tweet” button for the article is not working.
Editorial Staff
Thanks for letting us know. Just fixed the issue
Admin
Frank Schwarz
What are you doing to kill spam comments?
Editorial Staff
We’re using Akismet and Sucuri.
Admin
Jesse Brede
Thanks for posting this. I’ve had my suspicions about Disqus.
On the flipside, I’m sure they are struggling as a business model. Users need to make sure they have a backup of their comments in case they fold without notice.
Editorial Staff
Yeah they definitely need to make money to keep up with the bandwidth cost. If you have sync enabled, then all comments are backed up in your database.
Admin
Kushal Azza
Hello Syed, thanks for review. Even I was one of the person about Disqus
Glad that you did a write up.
Cheers !
Editorial Staff
Thanks for your patience Kushal. It took us a while to write about it, but glad you enjoyed it
Admin
Louise Findlay
I hate Disqus comments. The interface is so clunky and I like the simplistic WordPress comments with an easy email subscribe feature.
Editorial Staff
Thanks for leaving your comment Louise. Yup several of our users reported the same issue. We definitely value your feedback
Admin
Matthew
I agree Louise. Disque is just to junky and bulky.
Abhisek
I’m also facing sponsored content issue, even though I haven’t turned on the monetization option in disqus.
Reading this post inspired me to switch back to default wordpress comment. Can you please help me how to output a declaration below “ADD A COMMENT” like wpbeginner has one that says – “We’re glad you have chosen to leave a comment. Please keep in mind that all comments are moderated according to our comment policy, and all links are nofollow. Do NOT use keywords in the name field. Let’s have a personal and meaningful conversation.”
Jef
Hi Abhisek, I think you need this hook to output the custom message before the comment form:
https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/hooks/comment_form_before/
Editorial Staff
Hey Abhisek,
Glad that this inspired you to make a switch. As for comment policy, you can do that by using the comment form parameter comment_notes_before or comment_notes_after
Instructions are here:
https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/comment_form
We will do a detailed writeup on this as well.
Admin
Jitendr Vyas
The reasons you gave are mostly your problems not user’s problems. And one of the problem is for those who doesn’t have disqus account (which is very easy to create by the way with social logins)
I can see if any site has disqus comments it increases chances to add a comment compare to non-disqus comments.
and disqus has some more useful features too.
Editorial Staff
Completely agree with you Jitendr. Choosing not to use Disqus is definitely a personal decision that we made. We wrote this article because several folks asked us about it.
Our comment engagement increased after we disabled Disqus and it decreased when we had it enabled, so the numbers speak for themselves.
The ability to guest comment is not as easy with Disqus and anytime you require user registration it adds friction.
Definitely agree that Disqus has some neat features such as easily manage all your comment subscriptions at one place, and others that we mentioned in the article that we’ll miss.
Admin
Aakash
That is what I was thinking about Disqus comments.
I myself many times just turned away from making comments because it’s Disqus.
And I didn’t want to make account just to leave a comment.
This is really a great news, people will now realise that Disqus is
Really a great mistake.
Jennifer Rose
Exactly what I was going to say!
Steven Gliebe
Same here.
I abandon commenting when I see Disqus. Just not worth the hassle. Most blogs don’t (know to?) turn on the guest commenting option.
I also didn’t like how Disqus would basically let the universe see a listing of every comment I ever made on every website. I found that to border on privacy invasion.
Sweet and simple comments are the way to go.