Earlier this year we wrote about our plans to release new versions of Disqus with optional advertising and new features to give publishers more options for growing and managing their audiences. We're excited to announce that recently we launched Disqus Pro and Disqus Plus, our first two subscription versions of Disqus.

It’s been a few weeks since we posted about our commitment to fighting hate speech, and in that time we’ve had many discussions internally about what it means to be active in this commitment. I’ve been working with a committee of Disqussers to consider our policies and actions: how we develop products and how we do business in accordance with our company values.

Here at Disqus, we love our users. We also respect our users and their privacy too. Over the years, we’ve introduced stronger privacy controls such as honoring the Do Not Track setting in browsers, implementing Content Security Policy headers to protect you from any possible XSS attacks, and supporting a solution for loading Disqus over HTTPS. Our Home and moderation interfaces are already HTTPS-only, and now we are proud to announce that our commenting system, Engage, is also HTTPS-only.

Over the past month we’ve been talking to publishers of all sizes about our plans for 2017. During this process we’ve picked up some great feedback that we look forward to incorporating in future releases. In the meantime, we want to clarify our intent to keep Disqus free to use and address some frequent questions about advertising.

Free speech is a fundamental part of the Disqus network. We power diverse discussions across millions of websites, reaching billions of readers. Our platform enables people from across the web and around the world to share, discuss, and debate issues and their beliefs. Whether or not we personally identify with everything posted on our network, we believe in the right to speak our minds and share our ideas.

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.

Going into 2017, more than ever, we see publishers investing in tools to build their own, site-specific, communities and engage with their audiences. Some of the examples that we see from top publishers are premium or paid content, subscriptions, newsletters, and site-specific account systems. The unifying theme across all of these tactics is a desire to have more control over audiences and more powerful means of engaging and retaining readers. Our goal is for Disqus to amplify these tools and tactics to help publishers who use them be more successful. To do this we will release new, subscription-based versions of Disqus later this year that will give publishers more control over their audiences and more customization options.  

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.