Disqus: The Official Blog

Building a community is hard. Buckets of blood, sweat, and tears go into it. For over 2.5 million sites, Disqus is a part of that community building process. But sometimes it can feel like guesswork. We’re now making that arduous process of increasing readership even easier: announcing analytics for all publishers.

Every site can benefit from analytics, and with recent infrastructure upgrades we’re now able to offer these services to everyone. Previously, only a select number of publishers that paid us a fee every month received comprehensive analytics that included metrics like most replied to comments and the social login breakdown of their users.

The initial cut of our new analytics cover two key areas:

• Commenting: number of comments, number of votes, and top comments
• Revenue: money earned from using Promoted Discovery

Admittedly we’re starting simple, but it now allows you, for example, to see how posts you make coincide with how many comments are posted. Based on our analysis of the last 2 months of data, the most comments are posted on Wednesdays and the least on Saturdays. See if your community’s trends match up!

Over the next few months we’ll continue to add insights like which commenters are new versus returning and traffic referrals from within the Disqus network.

Check out your new analytics now. Have feedback or a specific metric you’d like to see? Let us know in the comments below!

Last Thursday, May 16th, we shipped our first Go project into production.

Disqus has a history of using one tool for the job and hammering through everything. Until now, that tool has been Python. This mentality has been extremely beneficial for us since we are a small team. Everyone is able to jump in to any piece of our stack with minimal effort.

Our realtime was having issues. It was slightly short of… realtime. The original realtime backend was written as a pretty lightweight Python + gevent service that handled a few basic tasks. Realtime consists of four components: a queue, a nozzle, a transformer, and a publisher. Everything was Python, except for the queue, which was something implemented on top of Redis.

The rate of messages has since increased, and our backends were having a bit of an issue scaling to our needs. We had 4 servers, each at maximum capacity, and our end-to-end latency was at best a few seconds. At worst, minutes. At peak, we process 10k+ messages per second.

Realtime is a pretty critical component to Disqus, so we decided to try something a bit different.

Go was initially very attractive to us. The language felt very natural coming from Python backgrounds, and the performance approaches C levels. The goroutine model and channels are very easy to work and immensely powerful to manage concurrency.

In roughly a week’s time, I went from initial commit to shipping replacement backends while only having a cursory level of Go knowledge. To me, that’s highly impressive. Our realtime end-to-end latency is on average, less than 10ms, and currently consuming roughly 10-20% available CPU on one machine at peak.

Overall, this should yield a much more responsive experience for our users, and gives us a lot of room to grow in the future. I look forward to trying out more Go and seeing where it can fit into our stack.

Would I use Go again? Absolutely! We were very happy with our results and can only imagine it getting better the more we learn. I highly recommend anyone giving it a chance and checking out what it has to offer for you.

I look forward to trying out Go for more projects and start contributing back libraries.

Does this sound fun to you? Looking for a job writing Go? Come work with us at Disqus!

We’ve been busy building lately. So what better time to introduce one more thing?

It’s called the Discussions Editor and it allows you to 1-click update attributes of any discussion on your site. For example, you might update the title or link associated with a discussion in Disqus to keep it up-to-date after changing it on your site itself.

Simply click into any cell in the editor, enter the desired information, and hit enter. The attribute will be instantly and automatically updated. It really is that easy.

You can learn more about this useful new tool at the Discussions Editor F.A.Q. Enjoy!

Last year we talked about our goal to turn time spent into time invested with the new Disqus.

We continue to be mildly obsessed with this concept of time as a top metric we should be thinking about. In fact we have been working with others like Chartbeat, who have embraced this as well with their Engaged Time metric. Their data also reaffirmed some of our own that show, on average, over half of all visits now scroll down to Disqus.

More recently, we got word from sites that they were seeing marked differences in time spent when using the new Disqus, similar to what we saw a couple years ago with the older version. This time, though, we wanted to see if we could go past anecdotal or internal data, and instead get numerically reliable measurements based on a public standard. We also wanted to see if we could find samples that would show results for a number of commenting systems, not just Disqus.

We concluded comScore numbers tend to be the most standardized, but since they don’t provide section-specific data, we needed to use sites for which overall traffic is highly skewed towards pages that have commenting. We therefore turned our attention to popular blogs that get a sizable amount of traffic to ensure the sample size was big enough and external factors wouldn’t skew results too much. This left us with 5 of the Technorati Top 100 that met the above criteria, and had used Disqus and at least one other common comment system in the past year.

Graphing out their comScore data for the past year, we found an across-the-board increase in average monthly time spent per visit when switching to Disqus (Red State, Talking Points Memo, The Next Web in September 2012), and a decrease when switching away from Disqus (Engadget, also in September 2012):

Techcrunch data, which we had going back a few years, was especially interesting. They have tried four different platforms in that span of time, for two months or more each, so we could get a fairly comprehensive breakout of engagement by platform:

So while a number of factors go into website technology decisions, and one should never be too conclusive about causation, the trends we saw were very encouraging. We spend a huge amount of effort thinking about what attributes meaningfully result in higher engagement, as defined by a user’s time spent with a given community. We’ve found that focusing in on our “3 Re’s” — Retention, Reactivation, Recirculation — has gone a long way in measurably achieving this goal. In fact, after recently hitting 1 billion unique monthly visitors, we also discovered Disqus now accounts for over 10 billion minutes of time spent each month by those visitors in aggregate. That’s more than 20,000 years! Naturally, we want to make sure it’s time well spent.

If you’d like to hear more on this and will be in the New York area next week, our friends at Chartbeat will be hosting us at their offices during Internet Week. We’ll share some more learnings about optimizing for time-based engagement. Click here to RSVP while space still remains.

Last month, Disqus achieved a significant milestone: our network hit a billion monthly unique visitors. No matter how you slice it, it puts Disqus in a select category of ubiquitous web services that millions of people use everyday.

Some other supporting data includes:

• 7 billion monthly pageviews
• 100 million user profiles
• 2.5 million site installs
• 1 million Wordpress plug-in downloads

But in and of itself, taking meaning from numbers this large is hard. And of course, Disqus isn’t a destination site so the numbers don’t lend themselves to easy comparisons. For the team at Disqus, they simply remind us that with great scale comes great responsibility. That far reaching impact is what motivates us.  

To mark the occasion, we wanted to do something a little different. First, we launched a new product today called AudienceSync. See our tandem post on that here. It enables users to port their profile information to their favorite sites’ registration systems. It’s great for publishers who want to tap into the largest audience of commenters on the web.

Then we wanted to dive a little deeper into our data and look below the surface of 1 billion monthly visitors. Comments and the community dialogues they make up are poorly understood and there’s little data out there about the patterns and behaviors at work. So our data engineers did some number crunching and we’re excited to start sharing some of it.

The Majority of Comments Are Tweetable

One of the first things we were interested to learn more about was a way to classify comments themselves. The character count of comments paints a picture of natural tendencies formed by other communication mediums. One of our findings is that the majority of comments fall under 140 characters: most comments are tweetable. (Conveniently, this already a feature of Disqus. Give it a try, it’s fun.) And then there’s a long tail of comments that we’ve categorized this way:

• Poems and Paragraphs: Statements more fully formed than can be captured in a Tweet.

• Speeches and Soliloquies: Fully formed arguments and ideas.

• New Posts: Readers writing their own article or full reply to the original post.

(Download the full image)

How channels like Disqus and Twitter can seamlessly pull audiences into a true discussion is something we’re continually thinking through. For publishers, identifying the hidden writing talents among their readers is another key takeaway. Readers increasingly look at comments as their chance to be in the story and as this data shows, some even want to rewrite the story.

Community Voting Habits Have Extremes

Voting on comments is an extremely popular function of Disqus. It’s a lightweight social action that keeps even those not leaving comments participating. It also serves as a crowdsourcing mechanism to surface the best comments. In this analysis, we wanted to know what it takes to earn an upvote and how that might differ according to the type of site you’re on. And again, character count told us a lot. By categorizing over 200 super active Disqus communities into 40+ categories, a wide ranging upvote-to-character ratio emerged.

(Download the full image)

What really surprised us were the extremes between fan sites. Fan sites are big users of Disqus. Fans of anything are by definition a community. They share a common passion. But in this analysis, sites dedicated to gamers and mobile fanboys showed rampant upvoting. Readers there aren’t so much having fully formed discussions as they are likely trading one-liners. Whereas sports fan sites were on the opposite end of that spectrum, with basketball sites showing an average character length per upvote of 42 and hockey a whopping 253 respectively. (It is playoff time after all. Passions are running high.)

Better understanding the breadth of community types on Disqus will be a focus of future research we do. Seeing and engaging with the galaxy of sites that use Disqus is already a reality. It’s called Gravity. Check it out if you’ve haven’t already.  

Replies Are an Active Community Metric

We get asked a lot what makes a great community. There are many components to a community. But here we wanted to start to lay the foundation for tangible data that moderators and bloggers could look at to judge just how active or vibrant a community is. So we did an analysis of our most active sites and looked at one key indicator: replies. Replies to comments (and replies to replies) are a sign that community members are interacting, that they’re talking with each other. In this analysis, sites focused on music, politics and entertainment were the runaway most active winners.

(Download the full image)

You’ll see more data releases from us in the future. If there’s anything you’d like to see us examine, share a comment below.

So What is Cooler than a Billion Monthly Uniques?

Finally, we wanted to mark this occasion by sharing a little love to you, our users. We don’t always get things right, but everyday we hear great feedback from you, our own community. That’s what’s cool to us.

So we put together a little video about you and for you. Enjoy.

We are excited today to announce Disqus AudienceSync: a seamless way for users to port their Disqus profile to publisher sites with one or two clicks. As reported by Adweek, Disqus follows similar approaches used by Facebook and Google+ and is the first discussion platform on the web to offer this technology.

AudienceSync is a powerful new way to give control to Disqus users who want to participate in discussions all across the web, while giving publishers a transparent, low friction way to accrue user accounts and manage their own membership systems. It removes the barrier between growing an audience through a large discussion platform like Disqus with over 100 million profiles, and meeting site-specific registration requirements.

The Largest, Most Engaged User Base of the Conversational Web
Disqus has now been installed on over 2.5 million sites and has over 100 million commenter profiles – the largest discussion platform of its kind. AudienceSync lets publishers tap directly into that vast user base of engagers, who tend to stay and click around a lot longer than the average skimmer or reader:

Tearing Down Walls to User Participation
A common point of frustration for users of standalone commenting systems is the need to create a unique profile for each site. No longer with AudienceSync.

We’ve long offered Disqus Single Sign-On, allowing a site’s registered users to seamlessly use Disqus. AudienceSync is the flip side of that equation — registered Disqus users can simply click a button to grant access to their basic Disqus account information. Publishers can then create an account for them, add them to a newsletter, etc., all in a natural, opt-in flow.

AudienceSync is the first of its kind in web discussion systems, allowing for a seamless, CRM-based approach to audience development with the entire registered Disqus user base. It was designed to be compatible with both in-house and third party user management systems such as Janrain, ensuring a site’s most engaged contributors are also full-fledged members able to benefit from all of the touch-points a publisher maintains with their community.

Highest Standards
Going into any product development process, we aim not only to adhere to but also promote core Disqus values like user privacy expectations, publisher TOS, and general transparency best practices. AudienceSync was no different here.

AudienceSync is built on OAuth, a standard web protocol with which Web users are familiar and comfortable. Because of this, we’re able to balance frictionless, universal identity with publisher control and flexibility.

See It Live, Get It Now
You can already see AudienceSync in action on sites like The Daily Meal and Michelle Malkin. It works with any registration system and will be on many more soon.

If you’re interested in AudienceSync, check out the help documentation and get in touch with us.

We launched a new website less than a year ago, corresponding with the release of our then brand-new commenting experience, called D12 at the time. The site was intended to showcase D12 and its new real-time features. We built a slick interactive demo – a demo that I’m still quite proud of – which, as of today, continues to serve as the hero piece at disqus.com.

The demo does a great job showcasing the D12 commenting experience. However it only showcases a single part of the Disqus platform. We thought we’d challenge ourselves with a redesign that tells a broader story about Disqus.

We started with a new interactive demo we’ve named Gravity. In the coming weeks we’re going to launch a new homepage, retiring our D12 demo in order to make room in the hero slot for Gravity.

“Okay”, you might be thinking. “But already? Why?”

This is the story of how Gravity came to be and what informed our thinking throughout the process.  

A small team kicked off Gravity back in December. Long before I started sketching ideas, we worked together on pinpointing the specific Disqus narrative we wanted to tell. We knew a couple things right off the bat:

• We wanted to highlight the unique range of communities and content on Disqus.
• We wanted visitors to begin to think about the platform as something more than an isolated commenting experience (a notion our D12 demo only reinforces).
• We also wanted to hint at potential future Disqus products.

As our discussions progressed, we came to the conclusion that the best way to accomplish these goals would be to showcase the best content from the Disqus network in a real-time format.

Learn more about how we’ve been tackling the content challenge around such a lofty goal in my teammate Sam’s blog post.

I’ve always admired the balance of art and science required to effectively communicate the story behind a dataset. During the 2012 elections I found a data visualization in the New York Times that used color, scale, animation, and interactivity to illustrate potential electoral scenarios.

“The Electoral Map: Building a Path to Victory”, The New York Times

I found the visualization immediately more illustrative than watching Chuck Todd walk through the same scenarios on “Meet The Press.” It was one of the first pieces that came to mind as I began to think about our homepage redesign as a potential data visualization project.

A few months later I attended a talk by Kim Rees, Partner at the data visualization consultancy Periscopic. She spoke about the impact a well designed data visualization can have if the designer creates an emotional connection with the viewer. She illustrated her point by demoing a recent Periscopic project that visualizes U.S. gun deaths.

The dataset included only a few simple statistics about each victim; information that was bleak, but not terribly meaningful in the form of a spreadsheet. Through Periscopic’s design work, however, the weight of the tragedy behind the numbers became immeasurably more poignant.

I left the talk thinking about how I might design something more emotionally engaging than a nice-to-look-at, well-kearned series of trending Disqus headlines.

One of my favorite data visualizations, another piece by The Times, illustrates President Obama’s 2013 budget. The content is certainly interesting.

Shan Carter, “Four Ways to Slice Obama’s 2013 Budget Proposal”, The New York Times

For me, though, the most compelling piece about the visualization is the design. Not only does it succinctly illustrate a huge amount of information, it does so through animations and interactions I found surprisingly enjoyable. On page load, the nodes move from the edges of the canvas toward the center, each seeking out its correct destination, reverberating slightly before settling into place. Transitioning from one tab to the next (“All Spending”, “Types of Spending”, etc.) triggers more delightful, gorgeous, physics simulations, with nodes colliding into and repelling one another before settling into their respective destinations.

I began to wonder if creating an emotionally compelling visualization could be accomplished through similarly playful, engaging interactions.

Starting the design process without regard for technical limitations, at least at first, often produces better results. Doing so frees the designer to explore solutions which match users’ mental models, rather than functions of the underlying architecture.

Given the fact that at this point I had decided our new homepage project should be animated, interactive, and that motion should be influenced by real-world physics simulations, starting the design process without any regard for technical limitations was easy – I had no clue how we’d actually build the thing. (More on how we eventually did build Gravity in just a bit.)

We worked through countless iterations, starting at first with sketches, and then wireframes. With the sky as our limit, and not many conventional interaction paradigms to rely upon, it was important that we could both produce new ideas quickly, and comfortably dismiss ideas that didn’t quite work, even some we really liked.

It didn’t take long to realize flat mockups would only get us so far in such an interaction-heavy design. Increasingly, the Disqus design team is moving toward less traditional design tools earlier in our process, in order to better communicate ideas that can’t be captured in a single picture. We’ve found that working within the native context of the end product (most often a web browser or mobile device) helps us find the right design solutions with fewer iterations. We also end up doing a lot more showing and a lot less telling as we communicate design solutions within our teams.

While working on Gravity, I moved from mockups to interactive prototypes earlier than usual, realizing the bulk of design work would likely be around the various physics simulations I wanted to use.

We decided on the JavaScript framework D3 to drive Gravity, and while I’m moderately comfortable with JavaScript, and have used numerous design and presentation oriented frameworks such as jQuery in the past, D3 presented an unusually steep learning curve. The evolution of Gravity’s design, paired with my personal quest to learn D3, made for a brief but somewhat alarming series of screenshots (“Oh boy, what did I get us into?”).

After becoming more familiar with the framework (something that couldn’t have happened without the talented front-end guys here at Disqus helping me over that aforementioned learning curve), the design continued to go through numerous iterations beyond the initial mockups. I began to find the immense number of controls D3 provides liberating rather than burdensome. The JavaScript library quickly became a new, powerful tool in my design toolbox.

Gravity will become the centerpiece of disqus.com. But where else it may go is our next big question. Share your thoughts below.

Over the past few days we’ve rolled out a few improvements to the Disqus experience that make it easier than ever to participate in your favorite community. It’s also a lot prettier. 

The first thing you’ll notice is that the comment area has been given a design facelift to make the experience feel more inviting, which includes larger profile photos and font size.  We’ve also updated the old default avatar to a new image that’s more representative of both male and female community members.  You’ll also notice that the social login icons have been given a little design love and we’ve now made logging into your Disqus account more recognizable.  

One of the most requested features from our community has been to add full-sized images into the Disqus experience.  We’re happy to announce that this is now a reality on communities that allow image uploads.  

If you’re not a regular to this blog, you might have missed the new Disqus profiles that we introduced recently.  We’ve made it easier to follow your favorite community members by including a nice large follow button as well as including two new tabs that show a user’s list of followers, and a list of people that the user is following.  

In addition to English, Disqus now supports over 36 languages.  We’re adding new languages every week, so if you don’t see your language in the list of already available ones, or if you are not happy with the existing translations, come translate with us and help make Disqus better!

We’ve re-added the ability for publishers to choose the default sort order of comments on their site.  For example, if you’re running an online contest or live blog event, you might want to have your comments sorted by newest first. By default the sort order is set to “Best”, but site moderators can now adjust the default order by visiting the Disqus settings page.  You spoke, we listened. Enjoy!

Today, Disqus is excited to introduce Gravity: a new way to see Disqus and discover great discussions in communities across our network. Finding great online discussions is hard. Typically, you have to go to them, they don’t come to you. And even then, there’s a lot of luck involved. Disqus Gravity changes that. It’s a live feed of trending discussions happening across the galaxy of sites that use Disqus.

See it for yourself at disqus.com/gravity

Most content discovery is based on counting page views and clicks.  Others count how often a piece of content is shared or emailed. And It’s usually delivered in a list or directory format. We wanted to do something new because there’s a difference between what people click and share and what they actually take the time to comment on and participate in. 

What’s at work?

So what you’re seeing in Gravity are discussions experiencing a spike in volume. What you’re seeing is what people are talking about. At any given time, Gravity is pulling trending discussions from 500 sites, showing 60 links at a time, grouped by categories. Categories make it easier to digest and find what’s most interesting to you.  

It’s also interactive and tactile to make it fun and exploratory. You can grab and drag topics around and zoom into the discussions dominating that subject. Best of all, you can find new content from some of the web’s best publishers and favorite communities.

Why did we build it?

The Disqus network spans a huge breadth of sites, and while Discovery connects discussions within each of those sites, we saw the need to showcase that diversity in one place. We plan to make this a centerpiece of Disqus.com, so visitors can easily find Disqus sites and click back out to join discussions, which in turn shares traffic with publishers. In the process of building Gravity, we’ve discovered a range of interesting sites and discussions we hadn’t found elsewhere. 

Gravity will evolve. We have plenty of ideas on where to go next and would like to hear yours. What would make it something you keep coming back to? What’s not working for you? Leave your thoughts in the comments below or take this feedback survey.

UPDATE: If you’re interested in the design process behind Gravity, see Vince Lane’s (the project design lead) description of its evolution.

At Disqus, our engineering team has the opportunity to work with a variety of new and exciting technologies – and we’re not shy talking about it. Four of our engineers – Adam Hitchcock, Burak Yigit Kaya, Mike Clarke, and Ben Vinegar – have been sharing what they learned at technology conferences at home and abroad.

At PyCon 2013 in Santa Clara, Infrastructure Engineer Adam Hitchcock took to the stage to describe the technology behind Disqus’ realtime architecture, and explain how we manage to remain efficient at scale. What’s particularly noteworthy is that Disqus’ realtime stack eschews traditional realtime tools like node.js and Go, and instead uses strictly Python and nginx (a popular web server application). This unique stack can serve up to 2 million concurrent connections, with peak data throughput of over 5 GB/s – all using just a handful of physical servers. If you’re not sure what those numbers mean, don’t worry. I’ve been assured that they’re very impressive.

To learn about how we pulled this off, you can watch a video of Adam’s complete talk, or read the slides. Adam will also be speaking at EuroPython in July.

At JsPyConf in Istanbul, and again at HTML5DevConf in San Francisco, Front-end Engineer Burak Yigit Kaya has been presenting material on EventSource, a promising new browser API for consuming events provided by a realtime source. EventSource is a compelling alternative to today’s go-to realtime browser technology – WebSockets – because of its ease of implementation on both the client and server.

Our team first implemented EventSource in Orbital, a Disqus labs project that visualizes comments around the world as they occur live. We’re currently in the process of converting our main commenting application to use EventSource, which has been using WebSockets so far.

If you’d like to learn about Disqus’ experience with realtime browser technology, including EventSource, WebSockets, and XHR polling, you should take look at Burak’s presentation. Slides are available online, and if you happen to speak Turkish, you can also watch the recording from JsPyConf.

Our operations engineer Mike Clarke spoke at the inaugural PyPgDay 2013 in Santa Clara, a day dedicated to Python and Postgres, two technologies at the very core of the Disqus infrastructure. Disqus proudly sponsored the event, which was a great opportunity to meet folks active in both the programming and database communities.

Mike described the strategy used to scale the Disqus database tier, focusing on the challenges of sharding data across physical hardware devices and their solutions. After describing how Disqus uses Postgres as its database, he shared an example application and reviewed some tips & tricks for others tackling similar problems.

Lastly, Front-end Engineer Ben Vinegar (hey, that’s me) – gave a presentation at HTML5DevConf about a new browser security feature called Content Security Policy (CSP). CSP provides a means for protecting against Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities in web applications, which are among the most common browser-based attacks today. XSS is a prevalent problem on the web, such that nearly every popular web service has been affected by them in recent years – including Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Spotify, and countless others.

Disqus has been experimenting with Content-Security Policy since December of last year. It’s currently enabled inside of our embedded commenting application, providing additional security in browsers that implement CSP – currently Chrome and Firefox. We’re hopeful that other browser vendors will implement complete support for CSP soon.

In case you missed Ben’s presentation on Content-Security Policy, you can catch him again at FluentConf in May. The slides can also be viewed online.

If you’re an engineer who’s interested in working with cutting edge browser and server technology, you might want to take a look at our jobs page. We’re looking for talented back and front-end engineers to help us build one of the world’s most distributed web applications.

Starting today, we’re rolling out some major improvements to the Disqus commenter profile that makes it even easier to get to know and follow the people participating in your favorite online communities.

In order to improve the overall reading experience, the new commenter profiles are now overlaid on top of the comments so you never lose your reading place again. When you’re done checking out a profile, you can easily jump right back into the comments without having the reload the page or hit the back button.   

We’ve also made it easier to follow your favorite community members by including a nice large follow button as well including two new tabs that show a user’s list of followers, and a list of people that the user is following.  

The new profiles were designed with mobile in mind so they will automatically resize to fit all different screen sizes making the whole experience seamless no matter what device you’re using.

You can make your new profile shine by uploading your own custom avatar as well as adding a short bio about yourself. To experience the new Disqus profiles click on any commenter profile photo on this blog or on your favorite Disqus community.

Get out there and follow a couple of your favorite community members and let us know what you think!

Have questions about new profiles? Check out our F.A.Q. 

Last week was unusual for Disqus. During the prior weekend, maintenance on a portion of our database infrastructure resulted in an unexpected performance problem. We uncovered this Monday morning, shortly before the tragic events at the Boston Marathon and the huge spike in news reading and commenting. The result: Disqus comments were intermittently offline over the course of two hours last Monday.

The Disqus architecture has multiple layers designed to prevent outages where comments do not display or function normally, and the perfect storm of extreme load and the temporary performance problem overwhelmed these protections. We take this extremely seriously, since any case where the comments fail to display is not only a failure in our core mission (making online discussions easy and ubiquitous) but also can reflect poorly on publishers using Disqus.

Separately, we’ve been battling a systemic issue for the last month that has affected the moderation interface on Disqus.com, which prevented moderators’ changes from being reflected normally. When moderators can’t see their own actions take effect, this can be at least confusing and at worst a major hamper to moderator productivity and community management. There have also been temporary side effects, such as a case where blocking a user from posting did not take effect properly.

Anything that gets in the way of moderators effectively managing their communities is a serious problem. Fortunately, this is a solvable problem.

Read More →

As the web’s community of communities, Disqus has come to know first-hand about the importance, and benefits, of identifying and engaging with your most active users. They’re called by different names — superusers, ambassadors, evangelists — but they all have something in common: they are passionate about and loyal to your brand or site, and are probably the most useful connections you can make within your community. But how do you engage with these users to ensure a lasting and mutually beneficial relationship? One of the latest applications to embrace the Disqus API, a social CRM provider called Batchbook, has a solution.

Batchbook calls these users Champions, and their software provides structure and context for identifying the people who are interested in talking about your brand across the web. Batchbook considers blogs the “original social network” and empowers active sites to build relationships through that network in three, simple ways.

Read More →

Promoted Discovery is part of Disqus’ new advertising business that aims to help advertisers reach interesting communities while sharing revenue with publishers. We just got started a few months ago and we’ve been learning a lot.

We learned that participating advertisers and publishers are seeing real results. While we’re excited about how quickly this part of Disqus’ business is growing, we’re more excited about where it’s headed. Disqus’ Promoted Discovery is in its early days and and it will look different in coming months based on our learnings.

• The Disqus network is growing, and discovery is a big driver of this growth. Over 2.5 million websites use Disqus and, in total, reach a billion uniques every month. We’re helping users discover new people and new discussions every single day.

• Our discovery and Promoted products are evolving. Or, in many ways, simply maturing. We’re eager to get more eyes on how we’re approaching the next generation of discovery and advertising within Disqus.

• The ad content quality that’s found on Disqus continues to improve as we accrue a larger and more diverse collection.

That last point is especially important to us right now. I’ve seen awesome, interesting promoted content on Disqus. I’ve also seen content that was not awesome. We know that we can do better in making sure that what Disqus surfaces simply doesn’t suck.

To address this, we created Disqus’ Ad Content Guidelines. These guidelines embody our philosophies and rules when it comes to advertising on Disqus and, as a publisher, blogger reader or commenter, what you can expect from us. They’ll continue to change as we get more feedback from our users and customers. Your voice is welcome.

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One of the most common questions asked of Disqus around the world is one I asked myself soon after joining: when will Disqus be available in my language? I answered that question for my own native Turkish by diving into the code and adding that language myself. But not everyone works at Disqus(but you can!) and our previous work at supporting languages could not sufficiently scale to support the global demand for Disqus. So today, we’re announcing the Disqus Translation Community: the tools and support for you to bring Disqus to your country in your language.

When we first launched translations support it was quickly deemed a success. The community was translating on a massive scale. Not long after we hit 54 languages we discovered we couldn’t support much more without making changes. So our main goal was to move to a new system that would scale better and put the community in the driver’s seat, to be able to set their own pace. We decided on the popular translation system Transifex.

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Hi. I’m new to Disqus as the head of marketing. I’ve had the good fortune in my career to work with many great inventors and innovators to help them tell their story. My first client was the inventor of the Post-it Note. (Another ubiquitous communications tool, just don’t call them “stickies.”) And what I learned from that experience and many others after, is that one of the best signs for a product’s future is when users start to take it over and make it their own. Inventors need other inventors.

So let me introduce you to Larry Regedanz, the computer and network systems teacher who built Gooqus, “The Discussion Search Engine.” Gooqus combines Google search with Disqus discussion. It has two main features: you can see what other people have to say about search results from Google and you can also see results by Disqus discussions.

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If you’ve been following us lately, you know that we’ve been working to bring Disqus closer to you (see our Hack Week projects.) And, if you’re like many people today, nothing is closer to you than your phone. We’ve been continuing to experiment across all major mobile operating systems. As a part of our process of getting in-the-field feedback, today we can tell you that a Disqus app can now be downloaded in the Windows Phone Store.

You’ll find all of the great features you enjoy about Disqus in the app: Keep up with the people you follow, receive notifications, read, vote on and post comments, all in a fluid native application. You can even receive notifications and activity from your network via live tile and/or lock screen.

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Disqus is well known as a provider for web comments. But what we’re passionate about — and what we work on everyday — is understanding what makes online communities tick.

Anonymity in these communities (and comment threads) is a popular debate that comes up every once in a while. It’s a topic that’s been thoroughly discussed, but I’m glad that it continues to be a topic that people care about.

I had a chance to share my thoughts on why anonymity isn’t the problem with web comments, posted on Wired.com. Check out the post and share your thoughts right here in the comments.

Disqus is used on sites all around the world, in every country and across all types of communities. The new Disqus is already available in several languages and will be available in more very soon. One of the benefits of this reach is our ability to deliver a consistent experience all around the Web.

But it’s also important for all elements of a community, Disqus included, to feel native and unique to that community. For international sites this means multi-language support in Disqus.

So I’m excited to announce our latest development for non-English sites: integration with WPML, the easiest way to build and run multilingual WordPress sites.

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In October, to a limited number of publishers, Disqus introduced Promoted Discovery. We’re excited about it because it’s a way to grow our business while serving three core constituents of Disqus: readers, publishers and advertisers. We help readers find new discussions and stories. We give advertisers the opportunity to engage with this audience through promoted content. We share the resulting revenue with our publishers. All of this is delivered natively in the underutilized but highly engaged real estate of the discussion.

At Disqus, we think of content discovery as a better way for people to find stuff worth talking about. Our world of online community and discussion is self-selecting and organized around common interests, lending itself naturally to discovery. Increasingly, online communities are the places people go to find new content as traditional social networks become less dynamic.  

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