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Disqus user here. Thought I'd try and answer a few of the concerns raised in this post. 1. "Comment display is broken". That's a matter of opinion. I personall
by jgroome 15y ago
Disqus user here. Thought I'd try and answer a few of the concerns raised in this post.
1. "Comment display is broken". That's a matter of opinion. I personally prefer threaded comments as I find it easier to see the structure of a conversation that way. HN and (sorry) reddit use threaded comments, and I'd consider their comment systems among the best on the Web. Youtube, on the other hand, goes for "flat" comments, and, well, have you ever tried to follow a conversation on there?
Either way, Disqus actually gives the site's administrator the option: http://whatever.disqus.com/admin/settings/appearance/ http://whatever.disqus.com/admin/settings/appearance/. The author is right though, having the ability to switch between the two on the front-end would be super.
2. "Comment paging is broken". Completely agreed on the 900+ comments on pages of 10. However Disqus gives the administrator the option to separate comments into pages or keep them all on one page. I personally don't get hundreds of comments, so I keep pagination turned off.
3. "Login kills comments". Sounds annoying, but honestly that sounds like user error. Disqus does say "Post as..." when you're logged out, which I guess is KIND OF ambiguous, but surely it's the user's responsibility to make sure they're logged in under the correct account if that's what they want?
4. "Newest first is weird". Why? I prefer it. Again, personal preference. And again, Disqus gives the site administrator options for sorting.
I don't want to sound negative, but I can't help but feel this post was ill-thought-out and badly researched. The sites the author is speaking about have apparently just switched to Disqus, so I'm going to assume the administrators haven't got to grips with how the service works yet.
Finally: I just realised that I sound like a PR stooge for Disqus. I'm just a user, honestly.
- alexchamberlain 15y agoThere is no such thing as user error.
- mattdeboard 15y agoSpoken like a true "biz dev" guy.
- fredBuddemeyer 15y agowhat does respect for the user have to do with biz dev? if you want to connect with another system (human or machine) you accomodate it.
- mattdeboard 15y agoThere is such a thing as user error. Don't be ridiculous.
- jamesgeck0 15y agoIssue 3 sounds like a glitch. I've written comments while logged out and been able to log in without loosing them. I use a Disqus account and not a Google account to log in, though.
- terryjsmith 15y agoThere is quite a bit of flexibility that the author seems to have missed. But speaking as someone who has just recently tried Disqus on a major blog for work where a number of the comments are anonymous, the simple fact that the button is ambiguous ("Login as...") did dramatically drop the number of comments. I suspect this is largely due to the fact that most visitors are one-time visitors, not regular users of our blog, but I don't have any data to back up that assumption yet.
- damncabbage 15y agoI agree with all of your points except for #3. I think the "principle of least surprise" rather than the "principle of expecting-the-user-to-remember-how-to-use-THIS-particular-commenting-system" applies here.
- vsl2 15y agoMy biggest question in response to your points is why the administrator (and not the users) is given the power to set these options. Maybe its much easier from a technical implementation sense? I can't imagine that administrators are more concerned with dictating how their readers see the comments than getting users happy and actually commenting.