Today, after careful consideration and much feedback from our commenter community and publishers, we disabled Collapsed Replies across Disqus and reverted to the original thread format. We initially released Collapsed Replies (a new way of displaying comments within long threads) in March. The intention was for it to be the new default experience on Disqus. However, after listening to feedback, we realized that the update, at this time, is not the appropriate default experience.

Text formatting options, one of our most requested updates, is now available on Disqus. If you comment with Disqus regularly, you may know that Disqus already supported HTML tags to format text within comments. This update makes formatting options more visible and accessible to users and easier to use with simple one-click options.

Today we have a big update to share and want to know what you think. Reactions are now available for all publishers on Disqus. Reactions are a fun, low-effort, means for readers to engage on their favorite sites and for publishers to better understand their audiences.

After talking to several top publishers and researching they handle sign-ups today, we saw an opportunity to make generating sign-ups easier and more effective. To do this, we’re sharing a new feature in collaboration with our parent company, Zeta Global, with Disqus publishers. The Lightbox tool helps publishers easily create and activate custom opt-in forms and more contextual messaging to readers based on what content they read, where they came from, total visits, and more. With more engaging and relevant sign-up prompts, publishers that work with us see 2-3x more conversions on average.

Strong relationships with our publishers and users are essential. A critical part of these relationships is establishing trust and confidence, which is why privacy has always been a priority. Over the last several years we made regular updates, geared towards respecting users’ privacy and ensuring a safe experience on Disqus.

Welcome to volume 2 of our, What We’re Reading, blog post series. In case you missed our last post, this is a new series where we aim to share our favorite articles, posts, and reports, relevant to digital publishing, with our publishers, readers, and blog subscribers. As always, we love to hear your opinions about these articles and others that you are reading. So, be sure to share your thoughts in a comment below.

At Disqus, we love to stay up to date with the latest news, events, and trends in the world of digital publishing. It helps us to understand the challenges that today’s publisher face and better support them with new tools and strategies. Team members across sales, customer success, product, marketing, and engineering regularly share their favorite stories. We even have an internal slack channel devoted to sharing the latest, most relevant, and most interesting articles that are impacting the digital publishing industry.

Last Thursday Facebook shook up the publishing world when it announced plans to make the largest change in years to their News Feed. Going forward Facebook will prioritize content that users share over all other content. This means that, as early as this week, users will start to see less publisher content and more content from their friends and families.

If you've read some of our recent posts, you've probably heard us talk about the importance of audience relationship building. In a digital publishing landscape where publishers have less control over how readers discover and engage with content due to third party influence, building relationships and establishing direct lines of communication with readers is critical. Recently, we took the first of several planned steps towards helping publishers build relationships with readers at scale with the release of our Email Subscription prompt.

One of our favorite things to do at Disqus is talk with publishers about how we can help them grow. Frequently publishers tell us about their desires to grow their email subscription lists as a way to distribute their content directly with their readers. We took these insights and turned them into a new feature within Disqus. Starting today, publishers on our Disqus Pro and Business plans can now enable an email subscription prompt directly within the Disqus comment embed to allow their most engaged users to seamlessly subscribe.