Disqus Saved My Site!
May 10 2008 
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I’ve been using the Disqus social commenting system for a well over a 2 month now. Since I’ve started using Disqus, I’ve written numerous articles with nothing but praises not only for the Disqus product, but also for the great support team behind Disqus. While Fred of A VC mentions 3 Great Reasons to Use Disqus, David Risely thinks it’s pointless and possibly stupid. That’s OK. I’ll give one story as to why installing Disqus was the smartest thing I could’ve done!
In his post, Risely noted some unmoving concerns for the Disqus commenting system:
So, could I bring the comments back into WordPress if I chose? From this discussion, it seems the answer is no but they are working on it. And what happens if Disqus goes the way of the dodo? Did I just lose everything? Also, it seems as if you can’t moderate your own comments inside WP anymore. Apparently, they are working on a plug-in for that. So, not only are all my comments now on a remote server, but I have to separately log into a remote server to moderate them?
His first question seems to be the only true reasonable concern one should have. For his second concern, if Disqus went bye-bye, yes your comments would too. However, last month Disqus didn’t go bye-bye for me. Instead, my domain did.
Disqus To The Rescue
Unfortunately, this couldn’t have happened at a more horrible time. Not only was SheGeeks beginning to break ground in the blogosphere, but I had absolutely no backups of ANY of the files of SheGeeks. None, zip, nada! After my previous domain went down, I did a mad scramble to get what I could with the help of a lot of the friends and developers that I’d made a connection with.
Since I use Windows Live Writer to publish my posts, a copies of each post are saved on my hard disk. Yes, I went through the majority of them to salvage what I could. However, my comments were gone. Oh, wait! Disqus has them! AWESOMESAUCE!
I immediately emailed the Disqus support team and within an hour I had a reply letting me know that as long as my link structure was the same, there wouldn’t be any problems changing the domain url and getting the comments back on the new SheGeeks. It worked like a charm! The End.
Bonehead Preferences
As for Risely’s last concern, I actually like moderating comments via my Disqus dashboard. It’s a lot more efficient and organized than WordPress’ management options. However, this concern is more of a personal preference rather than a substantial reason to not use Disqus. Over 10,000 blogs couldn’t possibly be boneheads, including this one.
So if you haven’t made the switch to Disqus with no substantial reason as to why, why not give it a spin?
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Yah I am going to install it tonight or tomorrow.
http://www.ilovesubstance.com
Great post, but that remote hosting is still a sticking point for me. I have reliable hosting for my sites and I'm not worried about losing them. However, if Disqus goes out of business, I will have lost all my comments (as you pointed out). I consider that a risk which outweighs many of the benefits.
New tiny companies rise and fall all the time. We do not know where Disqus is going to fall in that mix.
I've been using Disqus on allaboutnortel.com for several months. At first, there was some push-back from people used to the traditional comment structure. But fairly soon everyone recognized the usefulness of features such as threaded comments. For anyone who has a blog that generates a lot of comments, Disqus is a solid choice. I would like to see some way of retrieving comments just in case, as well as trackbacks.
Mark
I think there is an option to export comments in the 'Configure' section of your dashboard. You can download comments in XML format or as an RSS Feed.
I think the adoption of disqus will grow and it will only get bigger.
As is pointed out above you can grab comments as XML or RSS, I believe that JSON also buried in the API. I just finished writting some code to import Disqus comments into Drupal's comment tables. Once it's cleaned up I'll post it, as it would make a decent way of doing backups (disable the comment module and import the comments via cron, you just reenable the module to stop using disqus).
The only downside for me has been the inability to import comments, which idssomething that their team is working on. For today it's keeping me from embracing it, but I suspect, in the not to distant future I'll be back.
The downside for me on Disqus is their creation of a destination site, taking traffic away from your blog, and, eventually coming up higher on search results than your blog. This is a problem. Your comments should be associated with you, not with them.
Nancy at JS-Kit.com
hmmmm… relying on the fact that somebody else holds my data to save me because I failed to backup — seems like an excellent reason to support a service don'tcha think? The End
Does Disqus take traffic away from your site? Hmm, I doubt it. It seems to me it provides extra links TO your site. Besides that: Website owners should know by now that interested users will really come back to your site.
I really like your article.
Disqus also saved my blogger.The blogger's comment system is totally a nightmare for me and for reader.
I'm testing the video comment feature.It's Awesome. :D
yea, me too.. thanks to disqus :)
Question for you: I have been using Disqus for a month or so and Now I want to start using Windows Live Writer. However, if I create a post in Live Writer and send it to my blog, that post takes on the built-in Blogger commenting system, not Disqus. Are you not having the same issue? Thanks for the help!
Great article. I've recently installed it and am a convert.
Your post sound like a promotional piece written for Disqus. I glad to hear that you like it. I've been thinking about adding this plugin to my blogs but have mixed reviews of this plugin.
i didn't know you can grab comments by rss
Disgus already seems to be winning the war. It's been awhile since this post, and has grown by leaps and bounds.
It is indeed an exceptional system
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Was a good read. I'll be back for more.
Interesting post. I have just bookmarked this at stumbleupon. Others no doubt will like it like I did.
Interesting post. I have just bookmarked this at stumbleupon. Others no doubt will like it like I did.
I have reliable hosting for my sites and I'm not worried about losing them. However, if Disqus goes out of business, I will have lost all my comments (as you pointed out). I consider that a risk which outweighs many of the benefits.
Disqus sure does make blog commenting a breeze. I'm all for it!
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sorry I was just trying to figure this disqus out
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sorry I was just trying to figure this disqus out
This helped a lot. I'm not using facebooks own code on my site. But the one drawback is id does not add the comments to the page code like Disqus does. Thus not adding interest for google (seo). On the other hand, I find the basics of fb's comments design much cleaner. and more attractive for their users to use. If fb just dropped the comments in the code of the page…
I was thinking of adding disqus to sites that weren't blogs so people could still comment.