Closing the feedback loop with new Featured Comment & Moderator notifications

Notifications are a core feature for how publishers on Disqus retain and re-engage with their readers. Currently, we send notifications on a variety of community actions:

• replies
• new comments
• upvotes
• new followers

Recently, we added a new category to this list: feature comment notifications.

You know what’s better than an upvote? A featured comment.

Featured comments is an easy way to highlight a comment that best captures an interesting insight or observation made in a discussion. In a busy and active thread, featuring a comment is also a method of curation. Furthermore, it helps steer an infant discussion in a certain direction so that the ensuing comments are civil, on-topic, and interesting.

How are publishers using Featured Comments?

Sites like Destructoid use it to recognize their commenters which has been shown to encourage more commenting activity.

The Atlantic features comments from site moderators to invite readers to contribute to future stories.

Explore.org features comments as a way to update and share announcements with their community.

On Android Police, developers sometimes stop by to respond to a story about their app or product which gets featured to draw more attention from readers.

“If a comment is featured, and no one knows about it, did the comment ever get featured?”

Wonder no more.

Whenever a site moderator features a comment, the featured commenter is notified about it with this notification:

Recognition deserves the proper reward and with this update, commenters can find out sooner that their contributions matter.

New Moderator notifications

In addition, whenever you add someone as a moderator to a site, they will receive this notification:

We provide two quick-action options:

• Resign: This lets you remove yourself as a moderator for a site without relying on a site admin to do it for you
• Follow: Follow your site’s community on Disqus to find the latest discussions happening in your community. This also lets you moderate discussions on the Disqus iPhone app.

We think these small enhancements are an important step towards closing the feedback loop between a site and its readers. Stay tuned for a follow-up announcement with user mentions.