New TLF Comment Tool (Please Read!)

Ahoy, TLFers!  You’ll notice that we’ve incorporated a new comment management system on the blog:  Pronounced “discuss” (not “discus” as one might well assume–a potential branding problem indeed for an otherwise promising start-up), Disqus has exploded in the last few months (Google Trends) to over 30,000 blogs.

Disqus should help the TLF become even more of a true community–in which comments can be as valuable as blog pieces themselves and in which the line between “reader” and “author” is further blurred.  Here‘s a list of cool things Disqus will let you, TLF’s valued readers to do:

Track and manage comments and replies

More control over your own comments on websites

Never lose your comments, even if the website goes away

Build a global profile, or comment blog, to collect and show off what you’re saying

Easier to comment on websites using Disqus

Reply to comments through email or mobile

Edit and republish comments with one click

In particular, comments can now be directed as replies to other comments, creating clear discussion threads.

You might be wondering:  “If Disqus is so darn awesome, why haven’t we incorporated it before?”  The answer is that, until the new Disqus plug-in for WordPress came out a few days ago, comments were stored only on the Disqus site and merely replicated on partner blogs–making comments unsearchable, among other things.  Now, we get the best of both worlds:  Comments will beseemlessly duplicated and synchronized between our database and Disqus’s.

While it will still be possible to comment on the blog just as before (anonymously or merely without a Disqus account), we do encourage readers to take a minute (literally) to set up a free Disqus account.  (For those of you who enjoy reading Terms of Use and Privacy policies or who just stay up late at night clutching their now-constitutionally-protected firearms and worrying about being tagged, tracked and someday unceremoniously culled from the herd, here are Disqus’s policies.)  For the less privacy-obsessed, here‘s a general FAQ about Discus.

There are a number of bells and whistles you can enable–like tying your Disqus account to other social networking sites and adding a small image of yourself (or some other hopefully-family-friendly image).  But the one important thing everyone who has posted comments in the past should do is to “claim” your old comments by entering the email address associated with those comments on Disqus. (You’ll get a verification email at that address.)  We would particularly encourage other bloggers who read the TLF to consider adding Disqus to their own blogs to take full advantage of Disqus as a platform for carrying on discussions across multiple blogs.

Please let us know by commenting here if you notice any quirks about the conversion, such as comments not carrying over from the old system or comments you want to claim as your own but can’t.

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