Fresh off our recent upgrade to the Disqus WordPress plugin, we’re back with another exciting new announcement!

Today we’re proud to release a new version of our comment text editor, featuring a host of improvements that will drastically improve the core commenting experience for our millions of users. 

What’s changed

First and foremost, our new text editor now provides commenters a much more intuitive WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) experience that lets you format your text (bold, italics, strikethrough, etc.) and see exactly what your comment or reply will look like before you publish it.

Text Editor animation-2

Markdown & hotkey support

We’ve also introduced Markdown support to our text editor, allowing you to format your text quickly via easy-to-use Markdown.

Here's a list of Markdown syntax that is supported by the new text editor: 

Disqus Markdown supportWe’ve also added hotkey support to allow you to format your text via keyboard shortcuts.

Here's a list of primary hotkeys supported by the new text editor:

Disqus hotkeysSee here for a complete list of supported Markdown and hotkeys plus additional helpful documentation on how to use them efficiently.

While HTML tags are no longer supported, the enhanced rich text, Markdown, and hotkey functionalities will make comment creation more user-friendly and hassle-free than ever before.

Across the board improvements

We've got more to announce! Further under-the-hood improvements made to our text editor include:

  • Smoother image upload + hyperlink experiences
  • Much improved username @mention experience
  • Multiple bug fixes and QoL optimizations across the board

Our overall objective for this new text editor was to make on-site community engagement for our commenters as simple and intuitive as possible. 

For our publishers, we hope that improving the core user experience for commenters will lead to higher levels of engagement and a better relationship between you and your on-site community. 

Try it for yourself

We think that our new text editor represents another major step forward for the Disqus product, and we hope you agree! Please don’t hesitate to let us know what you think down below, and you’ll be hearing from us regarding yet another exciting update very, very soon. ✌️