My Disqus Experiment is over. I’ve disabled Disqus on blogan.net (temporarily losing a whole five comments in the process, which I may yet manually add to my WordPress database should I exert the effort).
The deal breaker for me was the complete lack of control over the comments on my blog. I could only approve them or delete them. I couldn’t:
- Censor gratuitous profanity in an otherwise valuable comment;
- Shorten an URL that extends into the margin or fix one that the commenter almost got right; or
- Delete personal information (e-mail address, phone number, etc.) that the commenter left in a comment and asked to have removed.
Disqus has no ability to import existing comments into its system so I ended up having two commenting systems on blogan.net. This may get fixed in the future.
There also is no ability to export comments from Disqus and then import them into my WordPress database. This is another feature that I expect will get implemented later, but for now, the longer I stayed with Disqus, the more I would be held hostage.
There is no documentation on what HTML is allowed in a comment. Bold and italics worked; images didn’t (and probably just as well without being able to edit the comments).
I’ll continue to watch Disqus. I want it to work. It’s just not there yet.
In the meantime, blogan.net has two features that make commenting better than on a barebones WordPress blog:
- You can subscribe to comments when you leave a comment. That way you will know if anyone has responded.
- You can preview your comment before posting it. You’ll know beforehand whether the HTML you’ve used will work.
What should I experiment with next?