One of our favorite things to do at Disqus is talk with publishers about how we can help them grow. Frequently publishers tell us about their desires to grow their email subscription lists as a way to distribute their content directly with their readers. We took these insights and turned them into a new feature within Disqus. Starting today, publishers on our Disqus Pro and Business plans can now enable an email subscription prompt directly within the Disqus comment embed to allow their most engaged users to seamlessly subscribe.

The plight of the publishing industry is no secret. The landscape is continually evolving, leaving publishers scrambling to keep up. With third parties exerting more control over content distribution and engagement, publishers are becoming more disconnected from their audiences and more reliant on external platforms. Now, more than ever, we’re seeing the largest, most successful publishers, confront these issues head-on by investing in ways to strengthen the relationships with their audience.

It doesn’t take long to master the basics of using Disqus including all the best commenting and moderation features and shortcuts. Whether you’re new to Disqus or have been around this corner of the web for a while, it’s easy to learn something new every day.

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.