Disqus vs JS-Kit/Echo vs Blogger vs IntenseDebateBefore setting up my first blog I spent some time looking at the various comments systems that are available for the Blogger Platform.
The default comments that come with Blogger are Ok but they don't allow for some of the more sophisticated Social Media notifications that are becoming more and more popular.
These items are:
- Capturing Reactions from various Social Media such as Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed etc etc and placing these comments and reactions back into the Original Post so you can see at a glance who is talking about your content.
- Moderation - Moderation is very important in this increasingly spammy age. I need a powerful spam engine like Akismet to filter out 99% of all spam before it reaches me.
- User Self-Moderation: - I also want to be alerted of any content that whilst not being spam is considered unnecessary or offensive. I want the readers of the blog to be able to "flag" any bad comments.
- Building a Community - One thing I looked for at the larger well establish blogs like TechCrunch, Mashable, EndGadget, Lifehacker etc was that of building a community and to showcase regular commentators in the form of popular commentators as well as having a "reputation" factor so other, new readers of the blog can see how well respected another commentator is.
- Speed of Loading and Reliability - This is very important as I want the blog to be fast loading so that readers can access both the content and comments immediately without any noticeable delay.
- Support - Pretty self-explanatory. If I have a problem I want to get it fixed.
With all these in mind there were only 3 real choices for me.
Disqus
JS-Kit/Echo
Intense Debate
Based on all my criteria the easy winner in nearly all the criteria was Disqus. It has great Moderation, allows me to reply to a comment via email so that I don't have to visit the site. I can moderate via email as well and it has Akismet built in. It also has a nice gadget to display Popular Post, Top Commentators, and Recent Comments.
Also searching through Twitter and Forums, it also seems to have the fewest issues. A quick look at the JS-Kit offering (which is also the only one that charges) it appears on the surface to be the most powerful, but a little digging around and a look at their support site shows a very different story. Lots of users with unresolved issues and a whole post dedicated to the users wanting refunds. Not good PR there. Maybe in a year or two I might revisit JS-Kit/Echo but for now it seems the most buggy, slowest to load and the most complicated of the 3 solutions as well as being the only one that charges.
The other great thing about Disqus is that I can see from my Disqus profile all the comments that I've left on other sites which use the Disqus plugin. This is a pretty cool feature.
They have also recently added the ability to sync comments back to the blogger backend so that if you ever wanted to remove Disqus you can easily do so.
So if you're using Blogger or Wordpress and are looking for a way to spruce up your comments and to build a community I can strongly recommend Disqus. Oh and it was a total breeze to install on my site. Give the comments a test below if you like so that you can see how it works.
What are your experiences with the various comments systems?
Image thanks to 40Tech