Disqus: The Official Blog

Try out the new DISQUS 2012

Thu, 03 May 2012 12:48:00 -0400

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: this is currently only for existing Disqus users). We’re doing things this way because we want to learn from your feedback, make improvements, and then open it up to the public in June.

Here’s how we’re doing this:

We’re starting by inviting active websites that are already using Disqus.
Disqus 2012 can be enabled with one-click. It’s opt-in so you get to choose when you’re ready to try the new Disqus.
We’ll be inviting websites slowly over the course of the next few weeks. We’re not quite ready for everyone yet — you can request an invite to let us know that you’re interested in using Disqus 2012 earlier than others.

We’re really excited to hit this milestone. We started building a new Disqus to rethink what’s truly important for a discussion platform.

A couple weeks ago, I described some of the major themes of Disqus 2012 development:

Frictionless. The goal was to have a very fluid experience in Disqus. The new Disqus is truly realtime — our approach tries to take some of the best pieces of fast-paced chat and combine that with the structured depth of topical conversations.

Quality. Today, Disqus uses “Likes” as a way to give others a lightweight virtual wink. In Disqus 2012, we decided to expand on this with voting actions. With voting, the new Disqus encourages richer discussions to form by letting the community surface the best comments. By pairing this with a smarter scoring system, Disqus will help maintain quality discussions — but without silencing simply less popular opinions.

Personalized. We’re debuting My Disqus — a new personal view for people to stay on top of their conversations wherever they are. This is integrated right into the platform itself, so people will never have to leave the current page.

Discovery. Disqus 2012 will help websites better connect with their audiences. One of the first features to work toward this is the new Community view. This new view shows off the website’s top participants as well as some of the hottest discussions happening right now.

While we’re proud of where we are with Disqus 2012, we’re not done building. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to be adding features and making improvements with your help. In the meantime, there are 3 new things about Disqus 2012 that we think you’ll love:

Truly SEO-compatible. The new Disqus integrates in a way that is naturally discoverable by Google — out of the box, without any extra work.
Frictionless realtime. A truly fluid experience that’s available to all websites using the new Disqus.
A carefully crafted user experience that’s deliberately designed to drive participation and traffic on your site.

The new Disqus is also built to be more useful and easier to use for commenters across the web. We put together a video to introduce Disqus to people — check it out!

For the last month, thousands of users previewed the new Disqus and let us know what works and what doesn’t. We’d love to hear from you, too — you can check it out out in the discussion below and let us know what you think.

Graduation Day

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 16:58:37 -0400

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.

If you don’t receive an invite right away (or you don’t run a website yourself), you’ll still be able to poke around at Disqus 2012 as it continues to get tested around the web.

We’re lifting the veil a tiny bit higher with this latest preview phase. This is still a pre-release peek — we’re proud of what we have so far, but we’re even more excited about what hasn’t even made it in yet. Criticisms and suggestions are both still super-tasty to us. If you have some, we’d love to get it.

Ok, now back to work for next week’s release!

DISQUS API Recipes

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:54:00 -0400

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 to explore. Different coding recipes are available for all skill levels and include doing something as simple as retrieving a thread’s details.

Most of the API recipes available can be used by anyone, while others (such as those including SSO) will only work for subscribers.

Think one of our recipes could be better? Feel free to submit a pull request and contribute. Also, while these recipes have been a project of ours for quite a while, we’d love to hear what other Disqus API examples may be helpful.

Why DISQUS 2012

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 13:09:00 -0400

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 existing Disqus fans preview each step as we make our way towards a wider release. In our few years on the web, I like to think that we’ve gotten pretty good at listening and working with awesome ideas from the community. Every week, for the next few weeks, we’ll be inviting more and more Disqus users to preview the latest and give us their thoughts.

Why build a new Disqus in the first place?

By starting fresh, we were able to truly evaluate what was important. Disqus is now used on millions of websites and has hundreds of millions of people active every month. At this point, we felt that we had pretty good insight into how different types of communities operated and what made some of them successful.

With Disqus 2012, we’re trying to intuitively tie together the value of the software platform and the value for people who simply love to use Disqus across the web. To make this happen, we re-architected a bit and re-imagined even more.

There are 4 major themes that we ended up working with in development: frictionless, quality, personalized, and discovery. There’s a lot going on with any one of these themes, but today I’ll just give one or two examples to help you understand where we’re going.

What else?

Hang on, hang on, it’s still early. We have a lot more details to share, including additional examples for how we’re satisfying the themes I’ve highlighted above. If you’ve already gotten a preview invite, we’d love to hear your feedback. Every week, we’ll be inviting more users — stay tuned!

Import options for the Echo community

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 12:39:00 -0400

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 (Echo, Haloscan, or JS-Kit), so be sure to read the full guide.

Users currently have until October 1, 2012 to export their comments from Echo. If you have any feedback or questions, feel free to let us know in the comments below or via our support page.

Disqus for Business

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 11:46:00 -0400

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 were blogging about their entrance into social gaming.
As news broke of Zynga’s massive $500 million financing in 2011, All Things D was there with the commentary and insights into the looming IPO.
When Zynga filed to go public late last year, sites including Fox Business and Venture Beat reported with up-to-the-minute news, analysis, and conversation.
At the end of 2011, Zynga completed its IPO on the NASDAQ exchange, another Disqus partner.
For Zynga’s first quarterly earnings report in 2012, TheStreet.com, The Motley Fool and many others provided immediate analysis.

And today, Disqus threads everywhere (such as CNN Money’s take on Zynga’s latest acquisition) continue to debate the future of the company … as well as Alec Baldwin’s Words with Friends addiction.

Make your way over to the Disqus for Business page for many more examples, and let us know your current favorites or what other business communities you’d like to see using Disqus.

Introducing Orbital

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 19:53:00 -0400

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 orbital.labs.disqus.com.

At PyCon this year we took the opportunity to also showcase this map at our booth, and it a lot of people were curious about the data as well as the software. For us it was a really neat demo, but even more interesting was how straightforward (and small) the source code was. About a week ago, we finally got around to open sourcing the code.

We wanted to give a quick overview of how the technology works, but if you prefer, dive into the source code on GitHub. It’s all Python with a touch of JavaScript, and it’s extremely simple to understand.

The Stack

We use quite a few various pieces of technology for the map, most importantly:

HTML5 Canvas
WebSockets
ZeroMQ
Python and gevent
GeoIP data from MaxMind

Let’s look at how the map works from a top-down point of view.

The application starts with a user loading the website, which renders a fairly large PNG and scales it to fit the browser window.
It then connects to a WebSocket server to receive data.
When it receives data, it places it onto an HTML5 Canvas layer designated as the animation layer.

Rendering the Data

The animation layer is powered by a library called jCanvaScript, which handles redrawing the layer to give it the ping effect that you’ll see. It sits on this layer (and gets redrawn) for several seconds, where it is then permanently rasterized to another layer that is time-based.

The time-based layers stick around (currently) for about 30 minutes, and after that we remove one layer everytime a new one is added. Each layer generally holds about a minutes worth of data, which gives us about 30 minutes worth of data on the map at any given time.

Finally, a small snippet of text which shows the title of the page and the websites favicon is rendered when a new event is pulled in, but only when an event is not already visible.

The WebSocket Server

The backend primarily consists of two components: a web (and WebSocket) server and a feeder application. The server itself does several things, all of them powered by gevent:

Serves static media (the HTML, JavaScript, and image assets)
Manages subscribers
Listens for events to re-publish

If you’re not familiar with gevent, it’s a Python library which implements cooperative blocking, or coroutine behavior.

Serving static media isn’t interesting, and WebSockets are trivial, so let’s skip those and take a look at how we handle the re-publishing of messages from our feeder. If you take a look at the code, you’ll see we launch two services:

The publisher (run_publisher)
The WebSocket server (which also handles static assets) (run_websockets)

The publisher itself is actually very simple. It binds to two local sockets: one which acts as the ZeroMQ publisher and another which listens for new events from our feeder. In 15 lines of code, we have a PUSH / PULL socket which just takes an event and re-publishes it via another socket.

Jump into the WebSocket code, and you’ll see we have a subscriber for every WebSocket client. There’s also a bit of odd code in here to run the reader and writer for the client in different greenlets to ensure that one is not blocked by the other. Without this we can’t actually close WebSocket connections (the server must receive the closing argument as it’s a graceful close).

The Feeder

We’ve also included a sample feeder application. This isnt what’s used on the demo map, but it’s a great example of how you can send the data.

At the core of it, it simply generates data (for us, we stream data in) and then uses the PUSH connection which our server is listening on to send the data to the clients. A large chunk of the file is sample fixture data from our API, but the interesting bit is at the bottom. In about 30 lines of code, we take a message, geocode it, anonymize the data, and then send it to the server.

DISQUS Labs

With the recent public release of Labs on DISQUS we’ll be bringing even more internal projects to light. Orbital was our first official labs product, but not the last. We’ve also demoed another called Channels, which we’ve also open sourced, but we’ll have a post about it in the near future. If you were at PyCon, this is the software that powers pycon.disqus.com

And of course, if you want to come work on cool projects like this, we’re always hiring!

See What Disqus is Up to Next

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 16:55:00 -0400

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 has evolved to become a very robust publisher-friendly platform that has allowed users, all around the world, to have great discussion experiences across the web. We’re very proud about this.

So, what are we up to next? I’m glad that you asked. We’ve been feeling a bit innovative lately. Today, we’re working on expanding on top of our platform, but also revisiting our roots. For the last few months, we’ve been working on something we’ve been calling Disqus 2012.

The new Disqus for 2012

Disqus 2012 is a fresh take on the Disqus system — both a bit of rearchitecting and a bit of reimagining. We think we can build a version of Disqus that fully resonates with our original purpose: build delightful discussion experiences for the participants.

We’d love for you to check it out. Today we’re launching Disqus Labs, a way for Disqus users to experience some of the brand new, interesting projects that we’ve been playing with. And also today, we’re looking for some Disqus users to be the first people to try out the new Disqus 2012. If you’d like to be a part of this limited beta, you can sign up now by visiting Disqus Labs.

In the next couple weeks, we’re going to be talking more about some of the decisions we’ve been making for the product. Stay tuned. In the meantime, check out Disqus Labs and what we’ve been up to with our newest Disqus offering.

Disqus for Entertainment

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 10:32:00 -0500

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 also stimulate new ideas for engaging the communities you manage, or those in which you participate.

Head on over to the new Disqus for Entertainment page. Let us know about any other interesting examples you’ve seen in the wild, and stay sharp out there on the red carpet!

The All New Disqus Moderation, Introducing User Reputation

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 20:00:00 -0500

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 interface. Keyboard shortcuts speed up your day-to-day performance. More context allows you to see what commenters are replying to, all the way up the thread. More inline features means you can perform more moderation actions even faster, all without having to leave the admin.

And there’s more. Today we’re also excited to announce a brand new feature: user reputation tools. We can’t wait for you to start putting user reputation to work in improving your community. Here’s a taste of what you can expect:

User reputation

Reputation matters — users can participate anonymously, using a pseudonym, or with their given name. So we built tools to give you better insight into who is participating on your site, and how.

There are three reputation tiers:

High: These are your most active and liked users.
Average: This is where everyone starts.
Low: These users likely have many flagged and/or deleted comments.

User history

Learn how long your users have been around and how active they are. Whitelist your regulars, welcome your newbies, encourage your lurkers, and investigate the troublemakers.

Disqus user profiles have long shown a user’s activity to other commenters. Now that’s all available directly in the moderation interface. Quickly get a sample of both a user’s most recent comments and their overall history.

Unlocking reputation

User reputation wouldn’t be possible without two key components:

Our vast network — now available on over 1.2 million sites, Disqus is used by 70 million commenters and reaches 700 million readers each month. These aggregate numbers make it all possible.
Passionate, brilliant team members — our engineers put together a strong first recipe based on a number of signals. To help us improve the recipe, we’ve included a feedback link inline.

What now?

Take it for a test drive. Then email us your feedback; we’d love to hear from you. Note that the option to opt out and return to the old interface will remain for a little while longer.

This is just the beginning; more improvements are on their way. Our sights are set on even more ambitious milestones and we’re eager to dive in. Stay tuned for what’s next.

Disqus for Politics

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 14:30:00 -0500

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 many creative and wide-ranging uses.

With election season in full swing, we thought we’d gather up some of the most notable examples — check them out on the new Disqus for Politics page.

54 Languages and Counting

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 14:13:00 -0500

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 languages for publishers to choose from (look for the Language options in the Basic Settings area of the admin). They range from French and Spanish to Greenlandic and Azerbaijani, and use translations submitted and curated by our incredibly diverse international community.

These users graciously spent their own time to use the translations tools we provide in order to make the Disqus experience better.

Anyone with a Disqus account can apply to help translate for any of the languages we have available by going here: http://disqus.com/translate/apply.html

There are still rough spots—notably with providing the right context around the phrases to be translated, and the speed with which we get new translations out. We plan to address these and incorporate further improvements to the comprehensiveness of our translations and the ease of submitting translations.

But 54 languages is a respectable number, and evidence of the amount of (much appreciated!) effort our users have put into improving the global Disqus experience. I’m proud of what has been accomplished so far, and excited to see Disqus’ internationalization support expand in coverage and accuracy in the coming months.

Let us know what other languages you think should be added and any other suggestions to improve the translation process.

UPDATE: In the comments below we were also reminded of a nifty trick that Marina from HotforWords.com shared with us to allow Google Translate to work on the text of each Disqus comment. Click here to check it out!

We have a Jeff on the team! And a second Jon.

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 17:10:00 -0500

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, I’ve always wanted a Jeff on the team (it’s a trustworthy name) and now we have one.

Jon is joining our business development team based in NYC. While we already had a John on the team, I think a Jon, sans-“H”, is going to be a fresh attitude to Disqus. Jon is passionate about online communities and he’s going to be helping spread the good word of Disqus.

Welcome to both of our new Jays. I’m excited about the team that we’re building here — if you’re curious on how we’re growing, check out the open positions on our job page.

How I Customized Disqus in a Flash

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 14:08:00 -0500

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 tends to be pretty easy, thanks to anti-spam tools like Akismet. No, the part I don’t like is coding them.

You have to style the comment text, the commenter’s name, their avatar, the date and time, take care of indented replies, and design the comment box. And don’t forget to find a spot for all those social network log in buttons, too!

Call me lazy if you want, but that’s why I decided to use Disqus when I recently redesigned my blog. It takes care of a lot of those things for you, and the default Houdini theme does a good job of blending in with almost any design .

Still, I couldn’t resist tweaking a couple aspects of the theme:

Early adopter features

The first thing I did was turn on the Early Adopter Features (Settings > General). I’m not sure what it does exactly, but it sounded cool. After all, who doesn’t want to be an early adopter?

However, turning this on will change the markup outputted by Disqus slightly, so you might want to check your settings if you noticed differences between your markup and mine.

Cleaning up

One of Disqus’ big strengths is that it doesn’t just let you create individual comment threads, it also helps you build a community on your site. This is why Disqus has things like Notifications, a Community Box, and Settings for those various features.

However, for my blog I didn’t need to have access to those features right there on the comment thread, so I decided to hide them.

It’s as easy as:

#dsq-global-toolbar{
display:none;
}

Styling the commenter name

Although the Houdini theme does it bests to disappear (see what I did there?), it’s got a least one distinctive feature, the grey bar that sits behind the commenter’s name. By the way, did you know it’s not just plain grey, but actually transparent grey? That’s how it can blend so well with any color scheme.

Anyway, to remove it and make the commenter’s name stand out a little more, here’s the code I’m using:

.dsq-comment-header{
            background:none;
            padding:0;
            border:none;
            line-height:1.2;

font-size:24px;

}

Rounding the avatars

Rather than keep the default rounder-corner square avatars, I decided to use rounded avatars to keep in with the theme of my site. Here’s the code I used:

.dsq-comment .dsq-avatar img{
border-radius: 30px;

height:60px;

width:60px;

}

If you set the border-radius at 50% or more than the height and width, you’ll end up with a square so round, it’s actually a circle!

Happy accident

After styling the avatars, I noticed the indented reply form had a little display bug: the avatar was now partially hidden by the text field.

But coincidentally, I’m using the same effect in my blog’s header:

So I decided to keep it this way after all, even though it wasn’t what I intended in the first place.

Let’s hack!

Sorry if I conjured up images of teenagers cracking into the CIA mainframe. What I mean by “hack” is just using an undocumented Javascript function to make our implementation even more personalized.

ElectricToolbox has a great write-up on h ow to run code only after Disqus has finished loading.

Here’s what my code looks like:

function disqus_config() {

this.callbacks.afterRender = [function() {

$(‘#disqus_thread li[style=”margin-left:46px;”]’).addClass(“dsq-comment-child”);

$(‘.dsq-trackback-url’).next().addClass(“dsq-trackbacks”);

}];

}

I’m using jQuery to do two simple things:

Add the unexplicably missing “dsq-comment-child” to child comments. I’m not sure why it’s not part of the default Disqus markup, but in any case the only way I found of targeting child comments was by their hard-coded (booo!) margin-left attribute.
Add a “dsq-trackbacks” class to the trackback div that comes just after the “dsq-trackback-url” one. Once again, in Disqus’ original markup this div is left mysteriously classless.

Once those classes are there, it will be much easier to target those elements in your CSS to style them properly. Of course you can use that same callback function to add any class you want, or do much more with your comments!

The Final Product:

Conclusion

Of course, I can’t cover all the tweaks I did. Most are pretty boring spacing and font adjustments, but they’re important to make sure everything looks just right.

After all, your commenters are people who take time out of their busy schedule of reading Reddit to come explain to you why you’re wrong about whatever topic you were writing about (I’m kidding! I love my commenters), so you want to make sure they have a good experience. And a good design goes a long way towards that.

For more info about customizing the look and feel of Disqus, check out our CSS Styling and Theme Editor docs. We’ve seen other great Disqus custom themes out in the wild as well such as those on Learnvest, Telegraph, Engadget and People. If you have one on your site too, let us know below so we can admire and take inspiration!

Tip of the Week: Personalize your Profile

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 19:14:00 -0500

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 little more? Start by going to your Edit Profile window, accessible on the Disqus dropdown.

Make a name for yourself. In the Profile tab, Full Name is the name displayed next to your comments. If you didn’t get the username you wanted, this is where you can put it. While you’re at it add a short bio of yourself and your location in the world, which will be visible in the header of your comments and in your public profile.
Give yourself a face! Using a default avatar is boring, but if you go over to the Avatar tab you can upload an image of yourself. You too can be Internet-famous.
Connect your other online profiles. Such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google in the Services tab. Or don’t connect them — what circles you want to expose others to is up to you.

Promote your blog or site

A simple, yet often overlooked, option is to add your website into your profile. This means that whenever you leave a comment, your name will link to your website. Leaving interesting comments on other communities will drive traffic to your site. Because people are visiting due to your comment and profile, you can be confident that this is quality traffic by people who want to know more about your message.

Customize your Disqus experience

In the Account tab, you’ll find the username, email and password options. You’ll also see that you can choose your timezone and timestamp format to be either relative or absolute. This will format the timestamps on every Disqus site you visit, so you’ll never wonder when a comment was actually made.

Don’t have a Disqus profile yet? You can easily sign up for one here. If you’ve made any comments on Disqus previously, you can merge them into your shiny new account using our guide.

Pseudonyms

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 17:51:00 -0500

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.

Above all else, I’ve encountered incredible characters. I’ve had conversations with personalities that were wise, generous, or hilarious. I really cared about the things that these people said. But, in most cases, I didn’t even know their real names. They were using online handles, or pseudonyms. These handles may be similar to their real names, but it’s just as likely to be completely fictitious. In these online communities, pseudonyms are nearly essential because they allow people to be expressive, and appropriately so.

Choosing your own name is important

Your parents gave you the name that is on your birth certificate. Online, you can choose your own. Here at Disqus, we care a lot about the concept of pseudonyms online. To us, pseudonyms imply a choice of identity — names are not only for authentication, they’re for expression. On the other side of the argument, others may say that anonymous and pseudonym users are similar, and that the web is better off with required real names for all commenters because the quality would be better. As the Nymwars rages on, we decided to dive into our own data and do some research. How do pseudonym-users measure up against anonymous when it comes to participation and quality?

Click the image below for our results and then read on for more notes.

Notes

This is only using Disqus content, of course, but the data size is fairly large with 60+ million users and nearly half a billion comments.
We define anonymous users as users that are completely unverified. Pseudonym users are registered users that are able to choose what they’d like to call themselves. Real name users are those who’ve chosen to identify with Facebook when posting.
This isn’t an exact science and our methodologies aren’t lab-quality. However, we were careful to not misrepresent (even to ourselves) what our data showed us. Above all else, we dove into our data in order to better understand identity dynamics for improving the actual product.

What’s next? By looking at data on Disqus, we’re able to see pretty interesting things about communities. We’re hoping to identify the traits that make certain communities successful, and build that right into Disqus.

Tip of the Week: Shares & Reactions

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 15:57:00 -0500

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 resonates with you, and you think it may strike a chord with your best friend or an online acquaintance, forget the copylink-paste-openemail-findcontactinfo-addwittysubject-send routine. Just share it, with Disqus, directly to your Facebook feed, Twitter feed, or both!

Once you’ve written your comment and you’re ready to share, look for the Twitter and Facebook icon in the bottom of the comment box.

Your followers will immediately know if they’re interested in the thread because the shared post will show an excerpt of your comment.

If you just want to share the post, look for the like button at the top of the thread.

As a publisher, you will love this feature. It’s a social sharing tool that propagates your site content across the web, without steering traffic away from your site. Each time a commenter shares their insight, their followers will be linked directly back to your site.

You can enable these Reactions through your site’s General Settings. This allows Disqus to display who’s been tweeting about your blog. Along these same lines, if you connect your Twitter account with Disqus, through the Services tab in your profile, you will get a mention every time someone shares a comment from your site. Alternatively, you can add your Twitter name to your account under General Settings.

What do you think, time to start sharing? We think so.

Welcome Matt Hooker

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 15:07:00 -0500

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.

Most Disqussed 2011

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 11:52:00 -0500

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 found that three of the largest news organizations consistently appeared in the list of most commented threads: Al Jazeera, CNN and Fox News. The Telegraph also featured regularly as well as more vertically-oriented and niche communities like Engadget, IGN, The Frisky and Allkpop. However, the top 11 topics of ‘11 on Disqus — (our very own Zeitgeist) — all centered around politics, economics or high profile crime stories:

Arab Spring
US Debt Ceiling
Occupy Movement
US Budget
Wisconsin Budget
US Payroll Tax
Obama Jobs Plan
Arizona Shooting
Obama Birth Certificate
Casey Anthony Trial
Bin Laden Dead

Not surprisingly, civil unrest and fiscal policy issues dominated the conversation this year.

Compared to other lists, like AOL’s 11 Days That Shaped 2011, about of half the topics on our list are similar, whereas others that were considered big news events in 2011 such as the Japan Earthquake, the Royal Wedding, and the passing of Steve Jobs didn’t quite elicit the same level of response from engaged readers looking to share their thoughts or react to others’.

For similar insights within your own communities, check out your Disqus Analytics add-on or the Disqus API.

Which news stories did you talk about most this past year on your own sites and across the web?

The First Annual Disqus GINGERBREAD WARS!

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 17:47:00 -0500

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 with a scheme
to rally the troops…with a holiday theme.
Teamwork, competing, and sugar galore,
Enter: The First Annual GINGERBREAD WARS!

The rules were simple: form a team of 4-5, and create a Gingerbread House (or “house” or “haus” or “pile of rubble” or…whatever) that would make all other Gingerbread Houses crumble in fear. One representative from each team gathered supplies from the central supply table, and all supplies had to be used up before going back for seconds. With a 30 minute time limit, things got a little tense! :)

The teams did a great job, but only one could be declared the Ultimate Champion. Congratulations to Team 4 - their “DJ Ginger and the House of Bread” set the bar pretty high and they took home the gold.

“DJ Ginger and the House of Bread”, by Ben, Gabe, Jason, Adam, and John

Gotta give a little love to the other teams though:

It was a super fun event, and one I’m really looking forward to repeating each year as our team grows. And who knows, maybe someday we’ll combine forces to create a life-size house! A girl can dream ;)

And not to neglect the Jews of Disqus, we “lit” the menorah:

Thanks to Adam for being the Menorah Monitor while I’m out of town for the holidays!

We also collected a huge bin of toys as part of the Toys for Tots program run by the US Marine Corps, which will be distributed by marines to needy children in San Francisco. It feels good to give back (and it was fun to buy a bunch of toys for kids!), and I’m hoping that next year we’ll be able to do a volunteer event as a team. Any ideas or recommendations?

Until next time,
Kim

a bonus photo of the aftermath