As Berin noted in the last post, we have installed Disqus on the TLF as our new commenting system. There are a couple of things I’d like to highlight about the new system.
First, I want to underscore what Berin said: claim your comments! Why is this so important? First, this lets you and other users see a page with every other comment you’ve posted on the TLF. Second, people can choose to “follow” your comments and be notified when you post something. Finally, over at the TLF community page on Disqus there’s a “Top Commenters” leaderboard, and I know you want to be at the top. So don’t start from zero, claim all your existing comments.
Next I want to draw your attention to the two little arrows to the left of commenters’ avatars (photos). Most folks know what this means, but I’ll explain anyway for those who may not. This lets you vote on each comment to let the system know whether the comment is especially smart and interesting or boneheaded and unhelpful. Good comments (up arrow) move up to the top of the thread, and comments that receive negative votes (down arrow) move toward the bottom and eventually disappear if they get enough downgrades. If you’d like to sort comments by the order they were posted, and not by votes, you can click the “Options” button below and choose your sorting preference.
Last, I want to just mention a couple other cool features. If you post a comment and someone posts a reply to you, you’ll get an email notifying you of the fact. Pretty cool, but it gets better. To post a comment in reply to that reply you don’t have to visit the blog, you can just hit “reply” and write an email in response. Your email will get posted to the TLF blog as a reply comment. Also, Disqus makes a bunch of RSS feeds available. There’s a feed for all TLF comments, feeds for comments posted to a specific blog post, feeds for specific commenters, etc.
Anyhow, hope you folks like it. Now go claim your comments!
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New TLF Comment Tool (Please Read!)
by Berin Szoka on August 14, 2008 · 21 comments
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:
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. Continue reading →