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.

A few months ago, we highlighted 7 small updates to Disqus that you should know about. We’re working to improve Disqus every day through the release of new products like Email Subscriptions. Under the hood, smaller changes are released regularly to improve the experience for both publishers and commenters. Here’s a summary of notable changes we’ve made recently to make Disqus better for you.

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.