When we release new features like Comment Policy or the new Toxicity Filter, the Disqus Blog is your go-to place to learn about the latest product developments. In reality, we ship updates and deploy new code every day that improves Disqus constantly for both publishers and commenters. Some of the changes we make however are never announced on the blog.

In this post, we want to share 7 small updates to Disqus that you should know about. They include various bug fixes and improvements to popular features. These changes are all made possible thanks to the feedback you’ve shared with us so thank you for your continued support ♥ Here now are recent updates we’ve made to make Disqus better for you.

The Toxicity Mod Filter, a new feature to help publishers detect and manage toxic comments, is now available for publishers across our network.

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.

Earlier this year, we committed to fighting hate speech and began taking the first steps toward curbing toxicity on Disqus. As a Product Analyst, I focus on developing technology to facilitate good content. Our goals for this technology are to enhance community management tools for moderators, give users more power to address abuse and toxic comments within the communities they participate in, and improve the internal tools that our Abuse team uses for reviewing reported content that violates our Terms and Policies.

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.

Recently we've talked a lot about improving discussion quality and easing the burden of moderation for publishers. We're committed to continually delivering new features and functionality to help publishers foster high quality discussions while spending less time moderating. Over the next couple months we will release several moderation related updates. Today we're excited to announce the first of these updates that includes three new features - Comment Policy, Thread-level Pre-moderation, and Flagging Reasons.

2 new tools to fight trolls, improve discussion quality, and save your team time!

We're excited to announce two new moderation features for publishers using Disqus Pro - Shadow Banning and Timeouts. With these new features at their disposal, moderators now have even more flexibility when dealing with troublesome users. While the traditional user banning feature is a great way for moderators to keep spammers and trolls out of their communities, a one size fits all solution is not always flexible enough to deal with different types of users. That's where Shadow Banning and Timeouts come into play.

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.

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.