Disqus: The Official Blog

A Discussions Editor for Mere Mortals

Tue, 21 May 2013 07:00:13 -0400

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!

Time — Is On Your Side (II)

Thu, 16 May 2013 11:53:00 -0400

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.

What’s Cooler Than a Billion Monthly Uniques?

Mon, 13 May 2013 18:51:06 -0400

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.

Introducing Disqus AudienceSync

Fri, 10 May 2013 20:04:00 -0400

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.

Designing Disqus Gravity

Thu, 09 May 2013 15:44:00 -0400

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.

Designing toward a goal

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.

Telling a story with data

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.

Blue-sky design process

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.

Forgoing Photoshop for JavaScript

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.

The future of Gravity

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

A Visual Update to the Core Disqus Experience

Tue, 07 May 2013 18:07:00 -0400

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.

Refreshed Design

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.

Large Image & Video Uploads

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.

Improved Hovercards & User Following

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.

36 More Languages

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!

Ability to Customize the Default Sort Order of Comments

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!

Disqus Gravity: Picturing the Web of Discussion

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 20:59:00 -0400

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.

Disqus engineering hits the conference circuit

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 17:08:00 -0400

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.

Scaling Realtime at PyCon 2013

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.

EventSource at JsPyConf and HTML5DevConf

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.

Sharding PostgreSQL at PyPgDay

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.

Content-Security Policy at HTML5DevConf

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.

Join our engineering team

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.

New Profiles For Everyone

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 18:32:00 -0400

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.

New Commenter Profiles

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.

Following Made Easy

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.

Update Your Own Profile

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.

Perfect Storm - Why the Recent Platform Issues and What We’re Doing About It

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 13:48:35 -0400

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.

Realtime comment requests exploded the week of 4/15 versus the week prior.

The root cause of these issues is growth. Readers are commenting more than ever. As a result, Disqus usage is growing at a rate outpacing our planning estimate at the beginning of the year, and we’re playing catch up to get a major infrastructure upgrade in place to handle much higher loads. The solution involves sharding the core databases, which evenly distributes the database writes and reads across a number of machines. We started this project last year and it’s nearly complete. In three weeks, we expect to complete the sharding of comment data, which will alleviate stressors like last week’s emergency and the moderation panel delays.

In the meantime, we’re taking additional immediate action by accelerating our scheduled server upgrades. We’ve also tackled known bugs that were causing confusion and could appear to be related (but were not), such as a case where the comment counts could go negative in the moderation interface. Separate issues can get attention by different engineers at Disqus, allowing us to move faster.

To maximize our effectiveness, we can use your help. Please take a minute to take this feedback survey and tell us what issues you may be encountering. The more specific information we get, the faster we can find problems and apply fixes.

Please do not ask specific support questions in the comments below. As always, in cases where you see unexpected issues with Disqus, you can visit our status page for the latest news on the platform’s performance and report problems and get help via our support page. All other thoughts are welcome.

- Jason Yan, CTO / co-founder

Disqus Integrations: Engaging Superusers with Batchbook

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 17:41:00 -0400

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.

Capture Users

Batchbook allows you to import users easily based on two categories: most active and most well-liked. This gives you quick insight into who your most engaged and well-received commenters are on a single Disqus site, or across all your sites. The import creates a profile for each user in your Batchbook account where you can later attach additional contact information, notes, or to-dos.

Get Context

When you import a user, you are able to see where they’ve commented across all Disqus forums. This gives you insight into what they’re most interested in, and where they can potentially have influence. A custom widget shows you a user’s 5 most recent comments so you can always be on top of the conversation.

Track Engagement

User profiles also make it easy for team members to stay on top of conversations, even ones in which they’re not participating directly, since any comment can be recorded as a shared communication. In addition to making individual conversations accessible, you can ensure that you or your team is following up by marking any comment with a to-do. This makes sure that no important conversation thread is ever dropped.

Batchbook achieves this seamless integration using Disqus’ free public API. If you’d like to know more about the Batchbook integration, visit their Disqus integration page.

Are you working on a cool, Disqus-based project now? Have ideas, but need a little help with our API? Let us know, and keep an eye on our blog for details on other fresh integrations.

Open Comment: Disqus Ad Guidelines

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 18:23:00 -0400

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.

A major component of Promoted Discovery is to help websites drive more traffic and also make money. If you don’t think this is right for you, we understand. It’s not a condition of using Disqus. You can control how this all works — or turn it off altogether — by visiting your settings page.

As with everything Disqus-related, this is an ongoing discussion that we’d like to have with you. Jump into the discussion here to let us know what you think.

When Will Disqus Be Available in My Language? You Tell Us.

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 21:11:00 -0400

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.

To get started, go get yourself a Transifex account if you don’t have one already and then move onto Disqus’s page to start working on your language. If you don’t see yours in the list, feel free to click on the “Request a language” button to well, request a language. And if you are really passionate about this, drop us a line at translations@disqus.com or directly from Transifex to become a Disqus Translations Reviewer.

This is a very big step for Disqus since it allows us to be more responsive and appealing to those who don’t speak English. It also helps us keep all these languages up to date and top notch with the help of our awesome community. We are actually seeing the awesomeness happen again. The graph below was produced just by those people who got interested in translating Disqus, without any explicit call, in a week or two:

And finally, because the Internet is home to many invented languages, you can even translate Disqus into LOLcat, pirate and Klingon. This is both fun and real (thanks to Transifex.)

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 to make Disqus better!

Meet the Man Behind Gooqus: The Mashup of Google and Disqus

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 13:12:00 -0400

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.

Let’s take the example of the upcoming movie Hangover 3. The standard Google search returns over 40 million hits with links to IMDB and Wikipedia as the top two results. The content there has what you’d expect: basic plot summary and cast and crew info.

But when you filter by Disqus, you get nearly 800K results and the first two results are way more interesting: ‘The Hangover 3′ Poster Promises “Epic Finale” on SlashFilm.com and “New Poster for The Hangover Part III Spoofs Harry Potter” on IGN. And you can quickly jump into a discussion and read a gem like this one: “How many times can a group of guys get beyond blasted and lose someone during a bachelor party before they admit they have a problem?” (900 plus up votes and counting.) Very quickly you’ve learned two things: the poster has people talking and some Hangover fatigue has set in.

We first heard about Gooqus when it popped up on Hacker News last week and reached out to learn more. Here’s some of my Q&A with Larry:

Q. What’s your professional background?

I got my start in the tech industry right after high school as a telecommunications technician in the Marine Corps and have been in the tech profession ever since. I currently teach a two year Computer and Network Systems course to high school students. This is actually my first year teaching and I love it. It’s great to work with young minds aspiring to build the next great technology. I have spent the last 27 years in the computer and telecom industry working my way up to network manager for an Internet Service Provider. I also build websites mainly as a hobby.

Q. What role did your students play in dreaming this up?

My students want to build the next big thing. They do a lot of brainstorming. They do a lot of searching and they participate in a lot of discussions. Their biggest hang up is “everything has already been invented.” Even if that were true, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for improvement on what’s already out there. Gooqus was something I put together as an example site to show how PHP can be used to integrate completely different web services such as the top search engine Google and the top discussions service Disqus.

Q. What prompted the idea to combine Disqus with Google?

I have used Disqus on some other web sites I created. I really like the ease of implementation but I also love the consistent interface across the Internet where other sites use Disqus. Google is my search engine of choice and I often wondered what others thought about the search results. I thought it would be nice if Google had a comments section on their search results and knowing that Disqus is the go-to discussion provider, I thought, why not build it myself ? I particularly like the spam protection Disqus uses which without that it wouldn’t be feasible to try a mashup like gooqus.com

Q. What’s cool about this to you?

After you perform a search on gooqus.com you will see some filtering options. You can choose Web Results or Image Results. You can sort the results by Relevance or by Date. Just about every search engine offers these things, but I threw in something extra. You can click on the Disqus (discussion enabled sites) link right next to the All Results link. Once you do that the displayed results will only be links to web sites that have Disqus comments on them. There may be a few false positives but it seems to work pretty good. So you could search for hot sauce then filter the results to only sites that are about hot sauce AND that you can read or write Disqus powered comments about. I think that’s pretty cool.

Q. What other use-cases can you imagine for Gooqus? (see my example here that incorporates Twitter sharing capabilities from Disqus)

I haven’t given a lot of thought about the consumer side yet. In fact, I kind of built it for myself but put it out there for anyone to use. I really like your example of incorporating Twitter capabilities from Disqus and I can see how that could carry over to comments on websites that use Disqus to help promote web sites that others find interesting.

Q. What are you planning to do with it?

I plan on leaving it public and letting anyone who wants to use it to have fun with it. It may not suit everyone, but hopefully someone will get some use out of it

If you have more questions for Larry, his Disqus handle is Gooqus.

Let us know what you think.

Mobile Preview: Disqus for Windows Phone

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 19:24:00 -0500

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.

Now I know what you’re thinking: Why not Android/iOS/Blackberry? There’s no conspiracy theory here — it’s simply because we could. This project is a very early preview into what you’ll eventually see from Disqus across all major mobile platforms. With this first step, we’ll be gaining feedback that will be incorporated into future mobile product releases.

You might also notice that we’ve included an explore section, a categorized list of all the most active communities using Disqus. Discovering great discussions is a key focus for Disqus this year. Good discussions that you care about can be hard to find. From the desktop to your inbox to your phone, Disqus will introduce you to more stuff worth talking about. Disqus for Windows Phone is an exciting new addition to our portfolio of discovery capabilities. We have a lot we can improve with discovery and this is a great way for us to do that.

The app can be downloaded for Windows Phone 7/8 devices here, and we’d love to hear your feedback in the comments section.

Bonus: If you’re viewing this from a Windows Phone 8 device, click here to open the discussion within the app.

Anonymity and Online Communities

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 15:24:50 -0500

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.

WPML in Disqus for WordPress

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 08:00:00 -0500

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.

The integration requires no additional work. Simply set your site’s language(s) in WPML and Disqus will adapt to load in that language. (Limited to supported Disqus languages.) Disqus will even load in different languages per-page if you choose more than one language for a page in WPML.

If you run an international WordPress site, get the latest Disqus for WordPress and WPML plugin today.

Are you a WordPress developer? Our WordPress community means a lot to us — the Disqus for WordPress plugin is open source and has been downloaded almost a million times. Make a commit today.

Promoted Discovery: A Preliminary Report Card

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 11:51:00 -0500

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.

Our consideration of this part of our business has two key components. First, we know that Disqus users are different than the average Internet user. They are by definition in the conversation and more hungry for new content. In an analysis of organic discovery traffic, Disqus users viewed 56% more pages and spent 166% more time on site on average. Our audience leans forward and engages.

Second, by powering discussion on nearly two million websites we can serve both large and niche publisher sites in ways few others can. Using a native advertising approach, we also reach the mobile web without disruption. And in turn, we help advertisers find their target audiences, wherever they consume content. We have reach that’s tough to beat.

Results To Date

For Readers
People that use Disqus are part of the Internet’s largest community of communities. No matter what their interests are and as their interests change, Disqus gives people the opportunity to find new communities, content and people. We see strong engagement in both organic (unpaid) and promoted content. This demonstrates that our mix of content complements the user experience and enhances the value readers and publishers get from Disqus.

For Advertisers
Most advertisers have traditionally had to trade audience quality for quantity. Our initial performance data shows that is no longer the case. In this subset of the Disqus reach, we serve over 5 billion ads per month across 1.5 billion monthly pageviews, with both numbers showing strong growth month-to-month, as we further expand the program. Our initial group of advertisers includes MTV, American Express, Citibank and Intel among others. Advertisers using Promoted Discovery to drive traffic to their sites see Disqus outperform similar traffic sources by factors of 2-3x in areas where it matters most: page consumption, time spent and numbers of comments and shares. But the number we’re most pleased with is our renewal rate: 94% of our initial advertisers have committed budget to us for 2013.

For Publishers

In the short time we’ve been at this, we’re pleased with what we’ve seen. 10,000 publishers are participating with more joining every day. And it’s a representative, broad spectrum of the web and Disqus itself. This includes sites like Investopedia, Men’s Health, Bossip, New York Observer, and Smart Mom Style just to name a few. For our publishers, Promoted Discovery is an integrated way for them to recirculate traffic back to their site, provide relevant content recommendations and make money. They’re seeing increased flows of quality traffic and strong engagement in recommended content. Across all Disqus channels, we’re sending millions of referral site visits to publishers every week.

As we enhance the product and advertiser demand continues to increase we’ll be offering this to more publishers on a rolling basis. In the meantime, revenue payments to our initial publishers are being delivered in Q1.

Getting to Scale

The next phase of Promoted Discovery is about achieving scale in balance. Enhanced content targeting, broader publisher inventory and more control tools are all part of getting us there. We’ll ramp up in direct proportion to our ability to deliver success and a high quality experience for our readers, publishers and advertisers alike.

Stay tuned for more news in this space from Disqus.

Coloring Outside the Lines: Hacking at Disqus

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 12:20:00 -0500

A wiseman once said “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” We like our play at Disqus. So earlier this month, for the first time ever, we decided to take a little break from the usual. We put our regularly scheduled programming on pause and spent a week decoding the future of Disqus. We stepped outside our normal day-to-day and looked at what participation and discussion could look like in the future (or the end of the week, whichever came first.)

Disqus Hack Week was an opportunity for our teams to show, not tell, how great their ideas are. This week-long stretch allowed everyone in the company to show off their design, development, analysis, and testing chops in small teams. Each team included reps from engineering, design, infrastructure, customer support, business development and operations. This is a look at just a few of the things we cooked up.

Discovery
Disqus is the world’s largest network of conversations. By powering discussion on two million websites, we have our pulse on what people are talking about, all around the world. What if we could show you the most interesting discussions happening at any given moment? Several teams dialed into this opportunity and built products that surface the most interesting and trending discussions. Here’s a look at one:

Local
Disqus today is about conversations happening on the web. What if those conversations could include the places and things around you? In a mobile environment, the form and function of discussion changes. A restaurant could become the subject of debate. A concert the experience everyone wants to talk about. Disqus Local began our exploration into this world. With a working prototype up by weeks end, it may have even saved a few lives in our post-hack excursion to Vegas that weekend.

Media
The web is a playground for the artist in all of us. (Even cat pics count here.) But traditional online discussions are read-only. What if you could color in your conversation? One team explored bringing a more visual experience to discussion. A picture says a thousand words:

If you’re like us, you’re a big believer that people just want to be heard and technology continues to open up new and exciting ways for them to do that. And everyday from outside and in, we hear great ideas on how to use Disqus in original ways. Keep them coming. In 2013, we’ll be reigniting Disqus Labs. We’ve just scratched the surface on what we could build together. Look out for some of these new features to trickle into the core Disqus product or show up on our upcoming labs page.

Want to come hack with us? Take a look at our jobs page to see how you can bring these and your own ideas to life.

Introducing Disqus Digests

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 15:19:00 -0500

We’re excited to announce the release of Disqus Digest emails.

Digests provide updates from Disqus on the conversations and people you care about most, combined into a single daily or weekly email.

Digest emails are designed to provide a quick view into Disqus conversations which are relevant to you. They include article headlines, publisher information, a selection of some of the best comments, and links to jump from your inbox right into the discussion.

We hope Disqus Digests keep you up to date on the most relevant discussions without cluttering your inbox, the way instant email notifications might.

So, how do we determine which discussions and people you care about most? Well, we look for a few things:

Starred discussions

When you star a discussion, we’ll be sure to include updates from that discussion in your Digests.

Speaking of stars, we’re also pleased to announce an update to the Disqus star button. We’ve simplified its design and function, and think you’ll find it easier to use.

Friends activity

Let your friends help you find great discussions from around the web. When someone you follow participates in a discussion, we’ll let you know about it in your Digest emails.

You can easily follow others from any Disqus thread by hovering over a user’s avatar and clicking “Follow”.

Replies to your comments

Whenever you receive a reply to a comment, we’ll include the reply and updates from the discussion in your Disqus Digests.

Improving notifications

Disqus Digests are just one step toward more comprehensive, less intrusive email notifications. If you have any thoughts you’d like to share on Disqus Digests, please let us know here, or feel free to comment below.

Like other Disqus emails, you can unsubscribe or reduce the rate at which you recieve Digests by adjusting your notification settings.

Interested in learning more? Please visit Digest FAQs.

Please note: we’re rolling out Digest emails to everyone over the next few weeks, so keep checking your inbox if you don’t see Disqus Digests immediately.