Disqus is built for engagement and to enable community development for publishers and voting on comments is a simple way for readers to interact with content with just a click. Last October, we made the decision to display downvotes. We believe that either liking or disliking something is a large aspect of how we communicate with each other and engage with content, and we want to create spaces for people with different opinions to have more constructive interactions.

A business is not sustainable if it’s not consistently generating leads. That’s why a solid lead generation strategy is most vital to your business is lead nurturing.

The process of turning a browser into a buyer is not always easy, and a business needs to keep track of leads and data to know if their strategy is working.

We have an exciting update to share today! As you saw in our last blog post, we recently introduced text formatting options to the Disqus platform. Well since then, we decided that the text formatting bar needed a little addition, so we partnered with Giphy to integrate a GIF library! GIFS are an easy, fun, and low-effort means for readers to engage with their favorite sites and for publishers to better connect to their audiences.

Text formatting options, one of our most requested updates, is now available on Disqus. If you comment with Disqus regularly, you may know that Disqus already supported HTML tags to format text within comments. This update makes formatting options more visible and accessible to users and easier to use with simple one-click options.

Today we have a big update to share and want to know what you think. Reactions are now available for all publishers on Disqus. Reactions are a fun, low-effort, means for readers to engage on their favorite sites and for publishers to better understand their audiences.

After talking to several top publishers and researching they handle sign-ups today, we saw an opportunity to make generating sign-ups easier and more effective. To do this, we’re sharing a new feature in collaboration with our parent company, Zeta Global, with Disqus publishers. The Lightbox tool helps publishers easily create and activate custom opt-in forms and more contextual messaging to readers based on what content they read, where they came from, total visits, and more. With more engaging and relevant sign-up prompts, publishers that work with us see 2-3x more conversions on average.

If you’ve ever needed help building your audience or increasing engagement with Disqus, we have some support announcements below that may interest you. We’ve been hard at work improving our tools for both paid and free customers but our goal remains the same: to help you succeed in a volatile and uncertain publishing landscape.

Developing effective strategies for increasing reader engagement shouldn’t feel like guesswork. If you don’t know who your most avid readers are, the impact of your engagement efforts, or understand how your community is growing over time, that ends today.

It’s here! 🎉 After months in beta testing, the Disqus for WordPress 3 plugin is now available to download in the WordPress Plugin repository.

Version 3.0 introduces several notable improvements including an overhaul to Commenting Syncing, a new Automatic Installation feature, and a redesigned plugin settings page. In addition, we completely rewrote the plugin to utilize the latest WordPress APIs so that we can deliver you more frequent updates and new features in the future.

Recently, we released a new Email Subscription feature to help publishers grow their email lists. Many of you requested a way to automatically import new subscribers into your email marketing provider. Today, we’re excited to announce an update to our Zapier integration to automate this task and help you get more done with Disqus.

Zapier allows you to easily create workflows to connect all your favorite apps (over 1,000 to be exact) to do just about anything. Best of all, Zapier requires zero technical knowledge to get up-and-running.