Disqus?

Posted on February 21, 2016 by Tim Hall

Has anyone got experiences (good or bad) of using Disqus as the commenting system on a WordPress blog?

This entry was posted in asides, Blog Development. Bookmark the permalink.

8 Responses to Disqus?

  1. Serdar Yegulalp says:
    February 21, 2016 at 3:07 pm

    I use it on multiple sites and have had excellent results. I’m using Movable Type rather than WordPress — and soon I won’t be using either of those things if I’m lucky — but it works well.

  2. Tim Hall says:
    February 21, 2016 at 4:16 pm

    There’s a WordPress plugin that incorporates Disqus. It looks as though it will both import existing comments and mirror new ones into the WordPress database, though searching support issues suggests there are some performance and server load issues with the latter.

  3. Serdar Yegulalp says:
    February 21, 2016 at 4:21 pm

    My particular setup is completely divorced from Movable Type; all the comments are saved on Disqus’s side, which saves server load. Disqus also makes it possible to export all the comments in XML format in case you need to back them up or move them somewhere else, so I’m not too worried about lock-in. Part of why I opted for this setup was because MT’s comment system was so agonizingly slow that synching between Disqus and MT comments would have been no faster than using native MT comments anyway.

  4. Serdar Yegulalp says:
    February 21, 2016 at 4:24 pm

    Side note: this is the project I’m working on that is meant to replace MT and substitute for WP: https://github.com/syegulalp/MeTal

    It’s taking a while to get it together, but I’m running one blog with it (if only in a very restricted way) and I plan to migrate everything else to it by the end of the year.

  5. Tim Hall says:
    February 21, 2016 at 4:39 pm

    I switched from MT to WordPress several years ago after the MT database got corrupted. There’s still a lot of lines in my .htaccess file redirecting incoming links for the old MT pages.

    I don’t miss the very lengthy saves for new posts (and new comments) while it rebuilt static pages.

  6. Serdar Yegulalp says:
    February 21, 2016 at 4:47 pm

    The project I’m working on keeps the static page design, but eliminates the rebuild times. They’re done asynchronously, so you’re not on the hook waiting for a rebuild to finish after you update a post.

  7. David Meadows says:
    February 21, 2016 at 7:01 pm

    Forgive my ignorance, but what’s the point? Why wouldn’t you want to use the WordPress comments system? Particularly if it’s on your own domain and you’ve got full control over the database (which I assume is the case for kalyr.co.uk).

  8. Synthetase says:
    February 23, 2016 at 12:55 am

    I use Disqus on a couple of other sites. It works well for the user, but I have no idea about the back end.