Product Blog

From Comments to Community

Disqus launched almost 3 years ago (wow, that’s a lot of internet years) as a drop-in comment system to improve how people discuss on blogs. 500,000 registered communities and 13 million profiles later, much remains the same but much has also changed. The way we think and talk about Disqus has changed over time from watching people and websites use the service. The system wasn’t only effective at getting more people to leave comments, but it was also helping websites pull together a more cohesive community.

We think that Disqus, as a networked community system, can work well as the platform your website uses to inject life into how your audience participates. We’re begining to roll out new features to power community activity in a broader way. We’ve been watching how these features are being used on various sites and have been making tweaks along the way. In this post, I’d like to point out some of the newest community features on Disqus.

Global Profiles

Global community profiles have always been a major part of Disqus (almost 1,000,000 profile views a month!) . We’ve just released a completely revamped approach to these profiles.

(more screenshots: one, two)

These are the new community profiles, powered by Disqus. You can bring up anyone’s profile anywhere on Disqus — just click on the avatar picture and a small box will pop open. The new community profiles are like baseball cards: with a quick glance, you can find out basic stats and information about a person. It’s a great way to learn a little more about the author of the super-smart comment that just wowed you. Check out other communities she is active in, as well as other places she shares her thoughts, such as Twitter.

Also new is the built-in activity streams. These activity streams, which can be found within the profiles, record the person’s comments and replies as they post around the web, as well as comments that the person has liked.

Community Box

The new community box is just like profiles, but for communities. On websites using Disqus, you’ll find a button that looks like this.

(more screenshots: one, two, three, four)

At the very top, you’ll find stats for the number of comments posted, the number of comments liked, and the total number of unique people who have posted within that community. Underneath that are leaderboards which showcase the most active and most liked people of the community. “New Faces” is a way to welcome the newest participants within the last couple months. We think this is a fun, interesting, and unobtrusive way to get a feel for a community.

Likes, dislikes, and more likes

We announced community likes last week and have seen incredible activity numbers since. We hoped that it would encourage more activity from the less-vocal members of your community, and that’s exactly what we’ve observed.

Let us know what you think

Disqus is growing up to be a fuller community platform, but we promise to never forget about what users love the most: encouraging quality, interactive conversations; and offering powerful, versatile tools for you to use Disqus the way that you want to use it. We’re going to continue to offer cool, new features, but we’ll keep in mind that not every websites wants these features. You’ll always be able to customize Disqus and toggle only the options that you want to use.