May 2012
1 post
Try out the new DISQUS 2012
Today we’re releasing Disqus 2012 on a rolling basis to existing websites using Disqus. Disqus 2012 is what we’ve nicknamed the completely new version of the Disqus platform. Our plan is to invite websites — starting today and over the course of the next few weeks — to activate the new Disqus for their communities. You can request an invite here if you’d like to get started before others (note:...
April 2012
5 posts
Graduation Day
Last month, we introduced Disqus 2012 as a part of our Labs. Today, the new Disqus graduates from Labs and is moving onto a slightly-more-public preview.
We’ve just started inviting some Disqus users to flip on the Disqus 2012 preview for their websites. This will be on and visible to all website visitors — now you’ll be able to gather feedback from your audience and see how they take to the new...
DISQUS API Recipes
As a community support team, we run into many users of our developer community who would like to start using the Disqus API but may be having a bit of trouble getting started.
For this reason, we’ve started what’s known as Disqus Recipes. Recipes is a GitHub repository that provides multiple code examples of methods and functions within our system that our developer community may want...
Why DISQUS 2012
The new Disqus is nicknamed Disqus 2012 because we’re working to make it the platform that we’d personally want to use in today’s world. It’s about pairing what already works with new, exciting ideas — but most of all, it’s about refining the core Disqus discussion experience that people care about.
We’re not all the way there yet. And that’s why it’s the perfect time for us to continue letting...
Import options for the Echo community
With the recent news of the discontinuation of Echo comments, which includes Haloscan and JS-Kit, we wanted to let those in the Echo community know that Disqus has them covered.
We’ve prepared a guide that walks users through exporting their comments from Echo and importing them into Disqus. There are a few exceptions which may vary based on the type of commenting system you’re using...
2 tags
Disqus for Business
We recently highlighted Political and Entertainment communities using Disqus, and today we’re shining a light on Disqus for Business.
One way to illustrate the breadth of uses is to look back at the emergence of Zynga as captured by mainstream publishers, niche bloggers and a variety of other online communities powered by Disqus:
Beginning in 2008, Zynga’s earliest venture capital investors...
March 2012
4 posts
Introducing Orbital
A few months ago, we created a simple in-house demo to show comments on a world map as they happened. We even still use it today internally on several of the LCD TVs we use as dashboards throughout the office:
The project was originally based on Mozilla’s Glow, but has since completely changed to be a more generic approach to real-time. Want to check it out yourself? You can view it live on...
See What Disqus is Up to Next
Disqus wasn’t originally built with bloggers in mind. Let me explain.
You see, I’m not much of a blogger myself. When we first started out, we wanted Disqus to be an awesome way to experience discussions on the web. Disqus would be great for those people, like me, who make their voices heard — not by blogging — but through the ensuing discussion that takes place.
Over the next couple of years,...
Disqus for Entertainment
In the spirit of celebrating the movie industry’s annual crescendo last week, we thought we’d take a few moments to highlight one of our largest community genres - Entertainment.
Whether it’s Hollywood news, celebrity musings, live events or other kinds of content, we see Disqus used on a wide variety of Entertainment communities today, and in a number of different ways. We hope these uses will...
The All New Disqus Moderation, Introducing User...
Two months ago we announced an all-new Disqus moderation interface. Based on a lot of great feedback we made many improvements, big and small, making the new interface a worthy follow-up to its already strong predecessor. So today we’re flipping the switch — all users now see the new interface by default.
What the new moderation interface is about: getting more done, faster, in one...
February 2012
1 post
Disqus for Politics
One of the cooler things about working at Disqus is getting to see the system in action on interesting and innovative sites across all sorts of genres. One of the most prevalent is Politics.
From campaigns giving voice to constituents, civic initiatives looking to increase involvement or political news sites interested in tapping into the most engaged users on the web, there have been...
January 2012
7 posts
54 Languages and Counting
It’s probably not a surprise that English is the most popular language that our visitors use — but it was revealing when I discovered recently that non-English languages comprise 40% of Disqus network usage. More than anything, it underscored the importance of having a robust, easy-to-use and comprehensive translation system.
We’re getting there…
Disqus today supports 54...
We have a Jeff on the team! And a second Jon.
I’d like to welcome two new faces to the Disqus crew: Jeff Pollard and Jon Hegranes.
Jeff joins us here in San Francisco from SEOmoz in Seattle. He’s now working with our backend engineering team to help Disqus continue scaling. Jeff’s been ramping up very quickly since he’s joined us, and I’m excited about the stuff we’ll be doing together. Also,...
How I Customized Disqus in a Flash
Today’s guest post was written by Sacha Greif. Sacha is a designer and coder living in Paris as well as the founder of Folyo. He recently put together a fantastic tutorial on how he designed CodeYear.com and here we present another great one on how he customized Disqus.
I need to confess something: I hate blog comments. Oh, I don’t mean reading them, that part’s pretty fun. And moderation...
Tip of the Week: Personalize your Profile
A Disqus account is already very handy as a persistent profile across all the sites you comment on. Did you know it’s also a powerful tool you can use to personalize your identity, promote your site, and customize your experience across every Disqus site?
Construct your profile
When you leave an interesting comment, people are going to want to find out more about you. Why not tell them a...
Pseudonyms
One day, I’d like to circle the globe. I like traveling, but there’s still so much that I’ve yet to see in the world. But in the online world, I’m already an especially well-traveled man. Through the years, I’ve explored and I’ve experienced extensively. Sometimes I’ll end up at amazing destinations with fun, unique cultures. Other times, I’ll stumble into some of the darkest virtual alleyways.
...
Tip of the Week: Shares & Reactions
Hi, this is Amanda, the newest member of the Community Team.
Here, at Disqus, we are all about facilitating communication and fostering the growth of ideas. How can we help you maximize the movement of your bright ideas?
We let you share your insights, with all of your favorite people, on the most popular platforms: Twitter and Facebook.
For example, if you post a comment about a topic that...
Welcome Matt Hooker
Today we’re welcoming Matt Hooker to the engineering team at Disqus. I first met Matt at one of the many meetups we are a part of (e.g., JavaScript Hangouts, SF Python). Matt will be focusing on ramping up our ever-expanding API offerings and various integrations.
Give Matt a warm welcome, you’ll be seeing quite a lot of him around here.
December 2011
6 posts
Most Disqussed 2011
That’s right…another end-of-year list!
You know you love them.
Here at Disqus, we took our own spin at sifting through the top news stories of 2011 by looking at those that sparked the most comment discussion vs. just those that received the most views, searches or other traffic measure.
Combing more than a million communities from all over the world on the Disqus network, we...
The First Annual Disqus GINGERBREAD WARS!
The team was exhausted, had a long last few weeks. With a team trip to Vegas and the Holiday Party! But benefits renewals and deadlines still loomed And this group was stressing - the year ends so soon! With all kinds of projects that had to be wrapped, Disqussers were ready for a long winter’s nap.
HA. Like that could ever happen!
Fariba and Kim stepped in...
Try the All-New Moderation on Disqus
Today, we’re releasing a complete overhaul of the admin tools on Disqus. Moderation is now faster and more efficient and we’ve improved usability throughout the Disqus settings and tools. During the initial rollout, the new interface is an optional upgrade. Go try these out for yourself by logging into Disqus.com then click the “New Version” link in the upper right.
Many comments are great...
Tip of the week: Highlighting your moderators
Each publisher on Disqus today can apply updates to the appearance of their embed theme, with some built-in options available under your Appearance Settings in the admin, by using Custom CSS, or by utilizing our Theme Editor (a paid add-on) for more advanced customizations.
Today we’re going to add a small piece of CSS code to change the header color for your editors, authors, moderators,...
28 Days Later
It’s getting towards the end of my 5th week at Disqus—and not a minute of it has been dull! In these last 5 weeks, I’ve gotten the opportunity to hit the ground running in my new role as Recruiting Coordinator by taking ownership of recruiting at Disqus, building my own processes and organizing information in my own way—with support from everyone, of course! One of the most amazing things about...
Welcome Adam Hitchcock
Yesterday marked Adam’s first day at Disqus as part of the engeering team. Adam will be shaping our future architecture, and helping with scale as Disqus grows to beyond nearly 4 billion monthly pageviews.
Adam is also founder of the ArchCamp meetup in San Francisco.
You can follow Adam on Twitter and Disqus.
Welcome to the team, Adam!
November 2011
2 posts
Disqus on SOPA and Internet Censorship
Today you might have noticed a small change to the Disqus logo on your dashboard. We did this to draw attention to some controversial pieces of legislation currently under consideration in the US: the SOPA (H.R. 3261) and PROTECT-IP (S.968) bills. Among other things, these bills would require online businesses to actively monitor and police their user contributed data for copyright-infringing...
Hello, OAuth
Earlier this year we launched a new iteration of our API, labeled as version 3.0. Today we’re happy to expand on this offering with full server-side OAuth2 support. This new integration allows application developers to expand on what they can do on behalf of users.
Some of you may have noticed we quietly launched most of the support a little over a week ago, and have been iterating on it...
October 2011
1 post
New feature: always know where your comment went
We’re rolling out a small feature to the Disqus commenting embed that we’re hoping will have a big impact. It’s a notification box that lets commenters know that one of their comments is currently pending approval from a moderator. It looks a little like this:
The goal behind this notice is to provide more feedback to commenters after they’ve left a comment. Sometimes comments can become...
September 2011
4 posts
Disqus Office 2.0
Finally! The moment you’ve all been waiting for! The internet-unveiling of the new and improved Disqus office! Ta-DOW! For part 1 of this epic story, click here.
We worked with a truly fantastic design team (Hi, Melissa and Seth!) to get this place looking less like that first apartment you get when you graduate from college and more like the sweet workspace of a growing startup.
...
Introducing DISQUS Ranks
I’m super excited today to unveil a feature that the team here at Disqus has been working on lately. We first started experimenting and testing this feature privately earlier this year, and have since been continuously iterating and streamlining the overall concept.
Today, we’re making Disqus Ranks (beta) available to all users with the Pro or VIP add-ons. Over time, we intend to make this...
Disqus Research: How Comments Drive Traffic
Disqus has been in the commenting game for almost half a decade. In that time we’ve seen plenty of isolated or anecdotal evidence that active, growing comment communities tend to yield higher page traffic. It wasn’t until relatively recently that we noticed a number of third party studies supporting those observations or the reasons behind them.
We were inspired to conduct some more...
Issues this morning
Hi everyone, Disqus had some nasty issues this morning that we’re not proud about. The Disqus system itself went missing on sites all over the web, and we spent a little too long trying to figure out why. Here are some details that I currently have.
We began rolling out an upgraded version of the moderation panel to “early adopter” users this morning. These changes incorporated...
June 2011
1 post
Movin’ On Up, Part 1: 404
404: Office Not Found? Except it was found. So…um…joke.
Kim here, representing the non-technical side of Disqus. I’m the Office Manager, which means that if it doesn’t involve clients or coding, I’m probably working on it. :) It’s an exciting job; I have the opportunity to get my hands dirty (literally, when I’m assembling furniture) and have a real impact on the company...
May 2011
2 posts
Pull people into your conversation with @mentions
I’m excited to introduce a new feature we’ve just rolled out called Disqus @mentions. @mentions allows you to pull people into new conversations by mentioning them in your comments. Before @mentions, commenting threads were an island. There wasn’t a way to reach out to people who weren’t already participating. Now with @mentions, you can call out your friends or friendly social media gurus, and...
1 tag
The Numbers of Disqus
This post is about the latest going-ons with Disqus. A lot has been happening over here, and they all can be somewhat represented with numbers. So, this post is also about the numbers of Disqus.
Four
Four years ago this week, Disqus became a company. We started Disqus because we thought that the concept would be fun to work on. The web is such a wonderful place: we worked on Disqus just because...
April 2011
1 post
Mixing it up at MIX11
Today Microsoft will be holding its sixth annual MIX event in Las Vegas, Nevada. If you’re unfamiliar with MIX11, it’s a gathering of developers, designers, UX experts, and business professionals creating innovative sites on the web.
This year MIX will be releasing a new version of Orchard, a free content management system. This version is packed with features such as a simplified...
March 2011
4 posts
3 tags
New integration with Google accounts
We like to think of Disqus as a bridge that connects your website’s community with the awesome, hectic activity that happens in other places of the web. That’s why we focus on great integration with the social networks people love, such as Twitter and Facebook. Nearly 13% of users choose to login through Twitter or Facebook when participating in Disqus communities. Today, we’re happy to...
2 tags
Scaling Disqus at PyCon 2011
Last weekend, several engineers at Disqus attended PyCon 2011 in Atlanta, GA. Jason Yan and myself gave a keynote on Sunday morning describing our development philosophy, infrastructure, and why we continue to use Python. You can watch the video below (or on blip.tv if you prefer), and the slides are available on SlideShare.
Fun with images: new ways to upload and preview
Images have become an important part of the web browsing experience. Every day we’re creeping our friends’ photo albums, sharing the latest animated gifs with co-workers, or meticulously crafting our LinkedIn avatars. At Disqus, we understand the power of images. Or as our colleague Anton says, “one rage comic says a thousand words.” So without further ado, I’d like to introduce you to Disqus...
A Look Inside the Disqus Theme Editor
A few months ago, we launched Disqus Add-ons, a set of paid plans that enhance your Disqus community with advanced features. Some of those features include our Analytics dashboard, Single Sign-on capabilities, partner API access, and of course our new Theme Editor.
Today I’m going to talk in depth about the Disqus Theme Editor, and what it means for users that are taking advantage of our add-ons...
January 2011
2 posts
1 tag
Introducing Houdini, the new look of Disqus
Hi, my name is Chris Jennings and I’m the Director of User Experience at Disqus.
I’m excited to introduce you to Disqus’ newest look. Up until recently, we’ve only been able to offer one theme out of the box (called “Narcissus”). Today a new theme, Houdini, is available by visiting your Appearance settings. New users will be using Houdini by default.
Houdini is everything you love about...
1 tag
Recent service interruptions
Disqus has recently been going through a rough patch with service interruptions affecting many users. We’re very sorry about this. Here are the details of what happened and what we’ve been working on.
As the new year began, we noticed an uptick in the amount of traffic loading Disqus. When traffic ramped up, our servers responded with our typical sub-second response times. However, we began to...
December 2010
2 posts
Changes to Facebook integration
If you use Disqus’ Facebook integration for login and sharing, there are some changes going on right now that we’d like to give you a heads up about. You may have received an email recently from Facebook with the subject line “Breaking change: API deprecations.” This sounds a little scary, but it isn’t — it’s actually related to your Disqus account.
When...
The Commenter's Dashboard
The new Disqus, unveiled just a few weeks ago, introduced add-ons, analytics and other tools for communities powered by Disqus. Since then, we’ve gotten a lot of feedback from people who use Disqus, not as bloggers, but as commenters. We’re constantly reminded that Disqus has become more than a community-building platform; it’s now also a network of over 20 million commenters.
We’re releasing...
November 2010
2 posts
Toggling the mobile theme
Disqus automatically loads a mobile version if a mobile browser is detected.
Some users have told us that they’d like to choose whether or not the Disqus mobile theme is automatically used. So, we’ve added a setting that lets you do that.
Browse to Settings > Appearance to find the setting.
The new DISQUS: Add-ons, Analytics, APIs, and more
Disqus is the best way to build a community out of the comments on your blog or website. But Disqus is more than just a great tool for websites; it’s also a thriving network of discussions from the 500,000 communities connected through Disqus. And we’ve just hit a huge milestone — the Disqus network now reaches over 200 million people per month. That makes us the 4th largest network in the US...
October 2010
1 post
Are my Twitter mentions and other reactions...
[ Latest Update: We’ve just implemented changes that should improve the performance of Twitter reactions. Thanks! ]
At the moment Twitter reactions are being affected by a rate limiting issue with the Twitter API. We’re working closely with their API team to resolve this matter and on the cusp of fixing it. With that said, it should be better within the next 24 hours so keep an eye...
September 2010
3 posts
Disqus Mobile: Moderate on the go
About month ago, we announced “Disqus Mobile”. Since then, we’ve had a tremendous amount of traffic on with mobile theme, and received several of requests for a way to moderate and keep up with your communities whilst on the go. Being very keen to listen to our community, we’ve been secretly working on something deep within the Disqus laboratories.
Today we’re announcing a...
3 tags
Sentry, our Django Error Tracker
One of the many challenges we face with a large web application is error tracking. We want to know when an error occurs on any of our servers, and we want to know the context and location of the error in our code. To help track and log these errors, we use Redmine and django-db-log internally. They work fairly well, and we’ve been actively improving them as we needed more features.
Around...
2 tags
Scaling Disqus (from a talk at DjangoCon)
A few of us from Disqus are in Portland right now for DjangoCon US 2010. As some of you geekier types may know, the Disqus service is made possible with some fine technology like the Django web framework. We’re big fans of Django and we’re proud to be one of the larger web applications using this framework.
Disqus’ Jason Yan and David Cramer gave one of the first talks at...
August 2010
9 posts
2 tags
Introducing Disqus Analytics. Testers wanted!
Over here at Disqus, we’ve been working on something that we think is very cool. It’s called Disqus Analytics, and while it’s still in its early stages, we’d like to begin talking about it now. By doing so, we hope to learn from your early thoughts and offer a much stronger prime-time product when it’s ready.
To apply for an invite, visit http://disqus.com/analytics
Disqus Analytics is...