It’s going on a year since I began my tests with blog comment sytsems. After my first evaluation of Disqus and IntenseDebate, I chose to go with Disqus because they had an API and would serve up comments server-side and make that content available to search engines.
That was, and remains, important to this blog.
I ran Disqus here until recently when I switched over to IntenseDebate with a brief period of using wordpress comments. I’ve now been using ID for a month or so and I figure it’s about time to report back from this recon mission.
In the past year, here’s what I’ve learned about these comment systems.
- Spam: Spammers will get through just about anything. Neither Disqus nor IntenseDebate can stop the human spammers. They both do a good job stopping the bots, but if you’re hoping that spam will disappear, you’ll be disappointed.
I think that Disqus is more widely used and therefore more targeted by spammers. The ID spam algos do seem to catch more of the obvious stuff. Both let the smart human spammers through.
Winner: IntenseDebate by a little.
- Nofollow: Speaking of spam, both solutions have provided surprisingly little customization around the use of the nofollow link attribute. In both cases, when the spammers get through, their links pass link juice. This encourages the spammers.
Disqus and ID should allow the blogger to configure who gets follow links (registered users) and who doesn’t (drive-bys).
I made a simple hack to the Disqus plugin that nofollowed any comment that wasn’t from a registered user or got voted down. That broke, of course, when Disqus updated their plugin. It would be dead simple for these guys to do something similar.
Winner: None.
- Portability: Both services deserve strong commendation for making their systems very portable. They both took the stance that the blogger owns the comments and they have made it very easy, at least with Wordpress, to sync comments and remove their software. They may regret this decision as it has been so easy for me to switch back and forth, but I think they realize that most of us wouldn’t be using them in the first place if this wasn’t the case.
There are a few gotchas there. Threaded comments (nested replies) is lost in the transition back to Wordpress. Moving from Disqus -> Wordpress -> IntenseDebate resulted in a flattening of my comments.
Also in the transition, a lot of spam seems to have resurfaced. I’m not sure why this happened, but I’ve discovered that many of my old posts are now harboring some nasty spam comments. Spam begets spam. The spammers search for other successful spam and target those blogs.
Winner: Tie.
- Community: The Social Media aspect of these comment systems seems to have largely fallen flat. You can subscribe to people’s comments in both the Disqus and IntenseDebate interfaces and keep tabs on what they’re saying where. This turns out to be not terribly useful.
What is useful is that Disqus has an API where sites like FriendFeed can incorporate comments into someone’s bigger-picture “lifestream”.
It’s also nice to visit a blog and see that you’re logged into their comment system. I still see way more blgs with Disqus than IntenseDebate, though that’s changing a bit in my own circle.
Winner: Disqus for their API and integration with FriendFeed, Facebook, etc.
- Usability: One thing that you do hope for from a comment system is that they make things easier on your readers. These both have nice features, like email notifications of replies, editing of comments after submission, voting (yawn), threaded replies, etc.
If there was one thing that I had to say I enjoy about these services as a user, it is the email notifications. It really does keep the discussions going.
Winner: Tie.
- Scalability: What happens when you get hundreds of comments on a post? Hey, it can happen to you too. Both Disqus and IntenseDebate will “page” comments when there are more than a certain number. Disqus has a simple “next 25″ implementation that you use to page through them, with no real indication as to how many pages there are and no way to jump to the end. IntenseDebate has a better implementation with page numbers, next and previous so you can skip around pretty easily. When there are hundreds or thousands of comments, this becomes really important.
Winner: IntenseDebate
- Reliability: It’s important to feel like the company that’s responsible for the lifeblood of your blog is going to be able to keep the servers running, scale with success, and fix problems.
The guys at Disqus are super responsive and very well engaged in social media where their customers hang out (twitter). IntenseDebate, much less so, though they are very responsive to email. I can 100% count on the fact that Daniel at Disqus will read this post. I’m less certain that the ID guys will see it. This has won Disqus many, many very loyal users.
I’m afraid that loyalty is what Disqus is running on at this point, and unfortunately, that’ll start to fade as issues creep in like they did for me.
IntenseDebate has the fact that they’re now owned by Automattic going for them, though that doesn’t seem to have gotten us much at this point, except perhaps some stability. I was expecting integration with the Wordpress 2.7 release.
I’m surprised that Disqus hasn’t been acquired yet. I’m hoping that they can somehow keep things running. It cannot be cheap!
Winner: IntenseDebate has the backing, but Disqus remains scrappy. Tie for now, but this can change at any minute.
Conclusion
I have to say, feature-wise it’s pretty much a toss up between Disqus and ID. For me, ID wins on scalability.
I should say Disqus loses on scalabilty, as it was theirs to lose. If it wasn’t for the issues I had, I’d still be using them, mostly because I they got me early and I was very loyal. Technical issues forced me away.
Otherwise, for now, IntenseDebate made up a lot of ground since last spring when I had my first look. It is working out pretty well, and even seems to have a certain “je ne sais quoi”. People are liking it.
