Does Anyone Want My Comments?

There’s something of a war going on right now, a war for your blog’s comments. Sure, any blogging platform worth its salt will provide you with a decent commenting system, but there are others who promise you more. Services like Disqus (which is used right now on this site) and Intense Debate say that they can add features, make commenting easier and encourage your community.

Now I am the first to admit that blog commenting right now sucks. When a company like CoComment, which does a mediocre job at best, can earn a living just by tracking and seeking updates on the comments you post across the Web, there is a serious problem. Users have a lot of reasons to prefer centralized commenting tools as having two or three commenting accounts beats checking dozens of sites for updates.

But what about bloggers? What do we get out of the deal? Though I’ve kept Disqus here on IS for some time, on PT I’ve been bouncing around from comment solution to comment solution trying to figure out what is best for my blog. I’ve tried nearly every service out there and the only conclusion I’ve reached is that no one, repeat no one, really wants my comments.

That is, at least not bad enough to create a truly compelling service…

Good People, Bad Products

Before I begin the rant, I want to take a moment and say that I’ve had interactions with people at all of these services. Every time I have talked with someone at Intense Debate, Disqus and JS-Kit, it has been a wonderful experience. They have very helpful people on their teams that bend over backwards for their customers. It’s great customer service.

The problem is that, despite all of this wonderful service, the products inevitably fall flat. It’s like having a five-star waiter serve you McDonald’s. No matter how much you dress it up, no matter how enthusiastic your staff and hardcore fans are, it’s still just ground beef.

What are my gripes? Well, let’s take the services one at a time. Each has their own unique pattern of fail.

Poor Disqus. Of all the three I’m mentioning, they seem to be the best right now. Even though Automattic purchased Intense Debate, Disqus manages to both provide the best features and continuously out-innovate everyone else. The problem is that they are victims of their own success. They’ve been bit by the spam bug, hard.

Even though this blog doesn’t get anywhere near the amount of comments of PT or other sites I work for, it gets many times the comment spam and most it is traced back to Disqus’ inability to filter. Though they’ve promised to deal with these issues, there has been a spam problem for a very long time. It has just merely ramped up in the recent weeks.

The biggest gripe is that Disqus will often email you even when it has caught a spam comment, turning comment spam into email spam. Smooth.

ID has managed to keep the comment spam issue under control, but has managed to place head squarely up ass when it comes to customer wishes. Facebook Connect usability is by far the most requested feature on their Get Satisfaction forum, getting more than 2 times the number of comments than any other suggestion. So what do they do? They refuse to make it a priority and instead say that it is “currently not on our dev list.”

Never mind that Disqus, JS-Kit and even standalone WordPress (with plugins) have this ability. ID is now dead last in terms of features (if you value Facebook Connect) and seems content to stay there. Way to listen to your customers…

I could never really get JS-Kit to work right on my site so I can’t offer any good gripes. Importing the old comments required me to email the entire WordPress XML file to them, which in turn necessitated putting it on a hidden URL since it was too big to attach, and the commenting system, once set up, didn’t seem to work right.

Where ID and Disqus are both real “set and forget” it seems JS-Kit takes a lot of work to make it look and feel right. That’s not a bad thing, but the instructions aren’t clear and the speed bumps in getting set up made me wary about investing too much time in the service.

I installed it, set it up, found that the comments did not work anywhere near as nicely as I wanted (though on other JS-Kit blogs it does look better) and turned it off almost immediately. I appreciate the help that they gave me, but it was going to clearly be a long road and I wasn’t ready for it right then. Plus it seems they’ve had some reliability issues lately.

What I Want

I don’t think I’m a hard person to please, but I do have seven things I want from whoever hosts my comments. Some of these are “solved” problems, but others are features no one is offering:

1. Easy Setup: I should be able to install the plugin, provide my login information and have the system up and running with just some minor tweaking.
2. Attractive User Experience: The experience, from the commenter’s perspective, should be very attractive and almost seamless. Bonus points for making me like looking at the admin panel as well.
3. Good Spam Filtering: Give me good spam filtering, hold the CAPTCHAs. I won’t think less of you if you use Akismet. I’ll think you’re smart.
4. Import & Syncrhonization: Your service should import my existing comments and then synchronize everything with my WordPress database. If your company goes under tomorrow, I don’t want to miss a beat.
5. That Includes Replies: Remember, since 2.7 WordPress supports comment replies, I expect those to be imported and maintained. No reason my comments should become unthreaded when I switch systems.
6. Facebook/OpenID Integration: Let me use Facebook Connect to post a comment. This lets my comment form reach a whole new audience and helps both encourage feedback and promotion of the site. Likewise, show some love for OpenID and other login systems.
7. Video/Audio Comments: Granted, no one has actually left a video or audio comment on one of my sites, but it’s a nice feature to have and there’s a good chance we’ll be seeing more of this in the future.

If you can do those seven things, keep your service reasonably reliable/fast and provide some good customer service, I’ll probably jump ship.

I’m not that hard to please, I just want it all.

Bottom Line

Right now I’m sticking with Disqus. I’m sure my readers on PT are tired of the repeat changes and, since IS is already on Disqus it seems like a good place to keep it for now. Though I hope they can improve their spam filtering, at least it has most of the features I need and good reliability.

I don’t know if I’d call this an “endorsement” of Disqus, but it is at least the service I have the least to gripe about.

But be warned, once WordPress gets Facebook integration built in or the plugins for it become a little bit less flaky, I’ll likely be moving back to my own comment system. That is, unless Disqus (or someone else) can really WOW me before that happens…