It must be the weekend because people seem to be arguing once again about the stupidest things. Top of the list this weekend is whether using the Disqus commenting framework on blogs is stupid or not. It was cleverly started by Fred Wilson who acknowledged in his post that yes he was an investor in Disqus but then goes on to provide three reasons why he thinks Disqus is da’ bomb for blogs.
Now there were a few posts by other bloggers who wrote about their reasons why they like using Disqus but the real discussion didn’t start until David Risley posted as to why he thought using Disqus was - well - stupid. Even though this got a few people riled up in the FriendFeed comments that followed his post David did in fact raise a couple of valid points. That said I have been a long time user of Disqus even to the point that I get blamed by a few bloggers for starting this whole mess (thanks Corvida 
). During that time I have seen more than a few questions raised about using Disqus and talk about the areas it is lacking.
The biggest question I have seen from anyone trying Disqus for the first time is "what happened to my old comments". This question occurs in most cases when folks install the plugin then type in their Disqus blog name as part of the required path and then hit the save button. Voila .. Disqus is running … but wait … where’s all my old comments?
Well they are still there but in most of the cases I have seen people have forgotten the most important second step of setting up Disqus. As you can see from the screen shot I have circled 
that option which 99% of all bloggers with existing comments need to set (click for larger view). By selecting this option Disqus will only take over for your future posts and any posts currently on your blog that have no comments. It will not touch any posts that currently have comments made on them. If you are a new blog with no; or very few, comments you can select the first option.
This leads into the second bone of contention that I hear the most often and that being that our comments are being off-loaded onto some-one else’s server. There are two points that people make when they raise this as part of their argument against using Disqus. The first point is what happens to all my comments if Disqus goes away. Well if people worrying about that would take a second to look around their Disqus control panel they would see that tab that says Configure which takes them to a page where they will see a button labeled Export or Import.
Now granted the Import option is still something that Daniel from Disqus admits they are working on but the Export works fine. From there you can select from two different formats to download in which if in your Wordpress install you got to Manage -> Import you can then import back into your blog. So that argument is null and useless.
The second part of of the off-loading argument is a harder one to deal with and one that people like Douglas Karr; who I respect in this area, have raised; which is the loss of SEO and Google juice when your comments are no longer on your own blog.
When I first considered using Disqus this was a concern of mine as well and with the lack of an import option keep me from using Disqus for a while. However I came to the conclusion that the potential for having WinExtra accessible to a potentially wider audience because of the community features the Disqus team were building into the framework out weighted what Google could do for me. This though is a strictly personal decision that each blogger will have to make if they are looking at any 3rd party commenting system.
As this seems to be a major roadblock and an area where there might be some confusion I emailed Daniel to see if he could clarify the situation regarding the Google and SEO questions. This is what he said in his reply to that email
The standard Disqus integration uses Javascript to pull the comments from Disqus onto your blog. Because search engines do not properly index JS-includes, a search for the comments would show up as Disqus.com.
We built our community pages with this in mind. One of the major points of the community page is to allow Google to index those comments there and lead search traffic to the originating blog. No other service using Javascript provides this sort of back end page.
Of course, if you self host your blog, we offer API-powered plugins that do NOT use Javascript, so the comments are indexed right on your site. We are working on building out all the integration methods to be as SEO-aware as possible.
These issues are very important to us at Disqus and we don’t plan on ignoring what people think. We’re aware and we’ve been working on solutions, some of which I mentioned above.
So along with a couple of things I can’t mention at this time it is easy to see that the Disqus team has taken this worry into consideration and provided bloggers with different options.
The last major argument I have heard against using Disqus is the lack of support for pingbacks or trackbacks which was almost a deal breaker for me as well. I have raised this point with Daniel from Disqus on a few occasions and he has assured me that the team knows how important this is to bloggers. The thing that he pointed out to me is that like the import feature this is something that they wanted to make sure that they did right rather than quickly. As with how they deal with regular comments spam; which by the way is fantastic, they want to be able to do the same to deal with trackback spam. So I take what Daniel has told me at face value and as a result I am a happy user of Disqus.
I realize that the weekends can get boring in the blogosphere but when it comes to using services like Disqus on our blogs that is a personal decision and only time will tell if it was a smart one. To call anyone using Disqus a bonehead as David did in his post is definitely going to raise the ire of Disqus users which if that was the intent he did a good job. At the same time calling people’s choices into question isn’t going to get you added to any Christmas card lists.
Conversation Tags: Disqus, comments, community
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If you know of a way to import them back into Wordpress, then I'll be thrilled to read about it.
I like Disqus, it's easy to use and hasn't put off any commentators, but I'm truly uncomfortable with my data being out of my control. Also, as others have pointed out elsewhere, you cannot edit a comment for things you wouldn't want, only delete it entirely. That's a no-flyer with me.
It's for those reasons that I've made the decision to deactivate it on my blog.
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For more casual bloggers I think Disqus may prove to be the answer to a lot of niggling issues in setups like Wordpress. And it adds so many good features to your blog's comments area that I think any SEO disadvantages are easily outweighed in terms of general usability and visitor happiness.
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In the end, i went with the Javascript version, since it provides the best user experience. I'll consider reverting to the API plugin when it's updated. In the meantime, creating a good environment for site visitors trumps everything. For me, at least.
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Please can you describe the exact steps needed to import an Disqus export file back into WordPress comments ?
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walk through type thing Andy
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All of the hoo-ha over which one is better is silly. There's lots of room in this space for lots of different systems. I appreciate Disqus, love the service, love the features. Someone else might feel the same about another. Both would be right. It's not worth a bitchmeme over, frankly.
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