WordPress Commenting Evolved – Echo, Disqus, and IntenseDebate
It seems the era of boring blog comment sections is over – from WordPress introducing threaded comments to CommentLuv, Gravatars, and tweetbacks, there are more tools than ever to liven up your post comments and get the whole “community fu” flowing strong.
If you really want to throw caution to the wind, you can dive into one of the very cool embedded, external comment systems such as Disqus, IntenseDebate, and Echo.
What are they? Broadly speaking, they are all hosted web services that attempt to link comments by individuals across the blogosphere, embedded in your WordPress install with a plugin. They also, to varying degrees, attempt to expand on the idea of ping/trackbacks – links to your post from other blogs – and display all inbound links from across the social media landscape, such tweets, social bookmarks, and so on.
They also make commenting a bit more fun, and coherent, for your readers. Using a single sign on they can track their own comments across the blogosphere – or at least, across any other blogs that happen to be using the same commenting system (maybe someone can create a tool to integrate your comments into one viewable pane?).
I should note – this isn’t a review post, as I haven’t used all three systems enough to make a properly informed judgement. This is just to highlight three alternatives to help make your blog comments a bit more interactive.
However, based on the various reviews I’ve seen, the cheat sheet version based on my own quick judgement is:
- Disqus: Most established player, in wide use, new updates. Works decently well on my current blog.
- IntenseDebate: Owned by the guys who built WordPress, so lots of hope for future development, though enough complaints on current stability to give me pause.
- JS-Kit Echo: Newest entrant, loaded with interesting functionality and a clean UI, though this one is a “premium” (you pay) plugin.
Disqus
From my incredibly unscientific scanning of the Web, armed with patented Mark I Eyeballs, Disqus is the “grandpa” of the crowd, having launched first. It offers very easy integration with WordPress, a nice moderation screen (both in WP dashboard and external), and a fantastic sidebar. I use it on my Social Mallard blog and have seen it in heavy rotation throughout the blogosphere, though that may reflect their early entrance into the market.
The Disqus team launched a recent update (August 25, 2009), effectively splitting the service into two parts: Disqus Comments, the comment management system for bloggers, and Disqus Profile, a separate comment management system just for commenters.
IntenseDebate
A relatively recent (one year ago) acquisition by the team at Automattic, I’ve been hesitant to try it on my blogs due to some bloggers having significant challenges with it (example) To be fair though, I’ve come across a lot of bloggers who love it and prefer it over Disqus. To each their own.
The fact that ID is now run by the guys at Automattic inspires a bit of confidence, as they put out some world class products.
See the complete feature list.
Echo (or JS-Kit Echo)
The new kid on the blog, Echo looks to be off to a promising start. One nice upside is CommentLuv now works with Echo.
See the complete feature list – it’s fairly exhaustive.
A big difference between Echo and the others? Echo isn’t free – $12 a month for the “Live” version, and I can’t locate a totally free option.
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Really great information in your blog. Please write more so that we can get more updates in your blog. Thanks a lot!
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hmm, well I can tell you that it is cool – I use both disqus and intense debate for my websites and I preffer the latter but disqus is very liked by google it would seem and tend to yield better search engine traffic to your site.
Just my 2 cents
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What a comprehensive and interesting blog. Really nice to read it. Please include more details if possible.
regards
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Disqus, Intense Debate, and of course regular WordPress comments.
your css or side bar look not so well in firefox
echo looks pretty nice but too bad it requires payments and other stuffs, so overall disqus and intense debate seems to be the two who competes as the top 1 commenting platform.
Woow This is best blog i have read on the tpoic
Thanks
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excellent post, thanks alot for the share!
Great review
thanks a lot for that amazing post! I like you blogs! discus is very useful
I preffer the latter but disqus is very liked by google it would seem and tend to yield better search engine traffic to your site.
I preffer the latter but disqus is very liked by google it would seem and tend to yield better search engine traffic to your site.
Disqus is a great commenting plug-in and it provides tight integration with Blogger, WordPress, Typepad, MT and Tumblr.
DISQUS allows you to monitor, edit and respond to comments on multiple blogs from a single dashboard
I think DISQUS is a great commenting system because I like reading a blog and I used DISQUS plug-in.And DISQUS is also great with the Facebook,Twitter and Open ID.
Disqus works well & allows following comments well.It's already cross-site enabled. Some good points raised in that post. Will be back to check for more.
The latest Disqus plug-in allows you to sync comments back to WordPress. This means that if sometime down the road I decided that the Disqus system isn’t for me, then I can switch back to the default WordPress comments without skipping a beat.
I love the plug-in. You really have a great article. That's the best post I've seen in a long time. A very helpful article for the web!
I have been using Disqus for several months now and it's an excellent system. You won't be sorry for using it.
Thanks for all the great comments everyone! Disqus seems to be the most popular from this incredibly scientific poll.
Disqus has ability to import existing comments as well as export comments. I didn't lose any comments when I moved to Disqus..Disqus is really good stuff methinks!
I'm actually testing this out for the first time here…. seems to be good to me.Thanks to Disqus …
Interesting post, thanks
thanks for posting
Disqus is better for me. I'd say by far the most important reason to use disqus is that discussion on your blog will turn up on friendfeed. This gives exposure to a really influential group of people.
Disqus is the only one I've heard of, so I guess I'm bias. It looks so much neater to use instead of the default comment section though, which is one of the reasons I use it.
I thinks disqus is great and a lot better………..!!!
I just read an article comparing Disqus and Intense Debate. It was good but this one if better because it's more informative. And not to mention include other comment system. Thanks for the share. Now I really know that I need to use disqus. Thanks again.
Like your write up. I've just put together another review/comparison of Intense Debate, Echo and Disqus here: http://blog.nublue.co.uk/next-generation-websit...
i've learned a lot the difference of these three commenting tool. now i have to try disqus and see how it works. thanks
all blog enthusiast all transfer to disqus system! haha great!