Now Available: Disqus Polls
Today, we’re thrilled to launch Disqus Polls, a powerful new tool that enables publishers to easily create and embed interactive polls directly onto their site, boosting audience engagement and collecting valuable insights. After weeks of feedback from early adopters, we’ve fine-tuned Polls to deliver the best experience for publishers and their audiences, and now, Polls are available to everyone!
Mommyish is not your typical parenting site. And LiteBrite, a rad commenter from their community, is the embodiment of their commitment to fresh and open dialogue about what it takes to be a modern parent. Whether she’s commenting on sex, pregnancy, relationships, raising kids, or the occasional story about baby teeth necklaces, LiteBrite is a commenter you want around. Her personal anecdotes lend depth to her opinions, and allow her authenticity to shine through as brightly as her name suggests. Plus, she’s a roller girl. And let’s be honest, a woman who knows how to throw an elbow with a smile is going to be a sparkling addition to any community.
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Commenter Hamish Lamont is exactly the type of person you want as part of an online community. He’s measured and thoughtful, but doesn’t mind a little healthy debate. He holds a deep appreciation for the things those around him are passionate about — in this case, motorcycles. As a rider, Hamish views building a motorcycle as the ultimate form of creative self-expression. And his site of choice to discuss this creative outlet is Bike Exif. Read on to see why.
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There are a lot of communities that help make Disqus the lively and illuminating network it is today. Out of all of these communities there are sites that continue to rise to the top and make us take notice. So, in the time-honored tradition of “End of Year” lists, we bring you not a lame, Top 10 list, but a GIANT BLOWOUT TOP 33 SITES ACROSS 11 CATEGORIES LIST! We’ve compiled this list based on Gravity, the trending visualization featured on the Disqus homepage, along with some good ole fashioned human selection.
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Cassandra is a highly scalable distributed database that we use in a variety of applications. It powers such things as loading the Disqus comment system, to our real-time Promoted Discovery product. We love the tool and have decided to help users of Cassandra get better connected to the community by hosting the Datastax Cassandra SF Users meetup at Disqus HQ.
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This week, we turn our spotlight on Inconspicuous Detective, a frequent commenter on Listverse. His favorite site covers a wide range of topics (from gun control to Voodoo to the artist Banksy), and you’ll notice that Inconspicuous Detective’s thoughts and opinions are just as varied. He takes inspiration from an unlikely source: detectives. Inconspicuous Detective lauds them for not just their knowledge, but their wisdom. He draws particularly from two characters that make a rather odd couple. Read on to find out who they are, and don’t forget to share where you draw your inspiration from!
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Our second Commenter Spotlight features NightOwl, a frequent commenter over at xoJane. We’re especially pleased to be presenting NightOwl this week, as her favorite community, xoJane, has just received the distinguished FOLIO Award for Best Online Community. XoJane is one of my favorite places to find authentic, generous and funny women sharing their thoughts, and NightOwl is one shining example of why the xoJane community is deserving of this award.
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We’re excited to introduce a new, regular series to the Community Blog — Commenter Spotlight. We’ll be featuring commenters from communities across the Disqus network. Each Commenter Spotlight will include a custom illustration (a loose representation of the commenter’s avatar and top-visited community), a 5-question profile, and a fun, extra section called “Up-vote or Down-vote?”. This last part is pretty straightforward: we ask the commenter if they would up-vote or down-vote 5 subjects, to give you a little sense of their personality (in addition to the profile).
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As we’re approaching 8 billion page views per month and 45k requests per second, we’ve learned a couple things about delivering comments to a lot of different people. Disqus is very well known for using Django for almost all of our web traffic, and that continues to be a thing today. As with any web framework, there are inherent trade-offs: rapid development vs performance, familiarity for new developers vs something custom, etc. Disqus likes to lean towards rapid development and familiarity over performance, and something fine tuned for our exact needs.
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We’ve been focusing a lot lately on the importance of community. When we talk about community, we think of it in two ways — online and offline. Offline, you might be in a weekend biking club, while online you’re a closet hardcore Robert Pattinson fan. So where do you go to bridge the gap? Online, where you can find fellow geeks of every flavor: foodies, gamers, fashionistas, mommies — the list goes on and on. But while you can find satisfaction in one of these two communities, these online and offline interests still remain separate. What can you do to unite the two?
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Disqus recently convened a panel of four women at BlogHer ’13 to talk about building community, return visits, and monetization through comments. These four accomplished bloggers — Danielle Smith, Lindsay Ferrier, Fadra Nally, and Lizz Porter — shared their wisdom, and what follows are 5 key takeaways that any blogger can put to use for building a stronger community.
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