It’s no secret that at Disqus we love using Slack for team communication and collaboration. One of the things that Slack does really well is turn links you post into rich and engaging preview content.

The new Comment Policy feature on Disqus lets you highlight the rules of your community. Not every community moderates in the same way. A comment that is allowed in one community may be moderated in another.

Your comment policy is one way to align those expectations with your readers from the very beginning. Furthermore, posting the rules for discussion not only improves the likelihood that a comment falls within a community’s guidelines, it also increases participation overall, according to research by CivilServant. In other words, your comment policy can be a place to leverage community norms for behavior that can save publishers time with moderation.

Over the course of three days this month, we hosted our first hackathon of 2017 at Disqus. Our goal was simple: build cool products to help publishers tackle their biggest challenges. We kicked things off with a pitch session where nearly 50 ideas were pitched! Afterwards, teams formed, ideas were iterated on, and plans were drawn out. It was time to hack.

WordPress is one of the most popular publishing platforms used by publishers on Disqus. Since its release, the Disqus WordPress plugin has empowered millions of publishers to increase reader engagement, retain readers, and foster thriving communities.

As a publisher, you already measure reader engagement on social networks but what about the activity that happens on your site? Pageviews and time on site are a good start, but it doesn't tell the entire story. Today, we're excited to provide an early look at the next generation of engagement analytics on Disqus.

No matter how you feel about CES, the annual tradeshow provides a glimpse into the future shaped profoundly by technology. Ideas once borne from science fiction novels are increasingly becoming reality from autonomous vehicles and a computer beating us at Go to VR headsets that can transport us into a completely different dimension barely indistinguishable from our own. If anything, the pace of change is accelerating faster than we can keep up with.

Recently, we rolled out several sweet updates to the Moderation Panel to reduce the time one spent moderating. With Priority Sort, moderators can now quickly focus on the comments that need the most attention first. Searching for comments is now faster and easier with the new Filter tool that lets you view comments by issue. Lastly, smart comment tags provides much-need context about a comment in moderation.

On October 20, 2016, Livefyre announced the shutdown of its official WordPress plugin. As a result, any new site owners will no longer be able to add comments to their site.

Today, we're excited to announce powerful updates to the moderation panel to help reduce the time you spend moderating comments. Moderation curates discussions to encourage a broad range of opinions to be heard and thoughtful interactions to occur, but it shouldn’t take away the time you need on growing and fostering quality engagement with your audience.