Comment Systems play a more and more vital part in social media experience. Since google announced to also index the most common commenting systems some new players appeared on the block. So which comment system to pick? It largely depends on the application you build, but if you are looking for a solution with many social media features -DISQUS may be the one you should be looking at. What if you would like to make a service only based on a commenting system as in saying all content of my website will be user generated! DISQUS is the one to go for … here is why:

Introducing http://roadjunkyguides.com - a project i developed with friends.

The website is based on WordPress as a CMS and a 100% custom made frontend. The website does not use the official DISQUS WP Plugin since it does not have the features we were looking for and also has some poor implementation for the wp plugin. The commenting syncing is not very convincing. it features a two way sync which i dont see necessary at all. Either you sync from a -> b or b -> a but not a <-> b. There seem to be a lot of people complaining about lost comments and so on. Here as some negative points:

• two way sync produces more errors and not really needed
• it does not update comment details when edited in dsq client or wp backend
• poor error handling
• no error/event/sync logging

In our case we needed a fast and realiable mirroring of all the comments from DISQUS an WP serving as a slave only. Also we needed a true reflection on every change on a comment/thread/profile or whatever (even when an author updates his profile url). So in the end we developed our own implementation of a dsq wp plugin based on a PHP5 class structure for bridging and syncing the comments.

With the comments in sync we have a server side representation of all comments for search, editors picks, and SEO harvest. The service but has more to it. We played around with the DISQUS Client and added some cool features:

• Identify admins/moderators based on the DSQ request/response object and event handlers + storing profile properties server side in PHP session
• Enabling the DISQUS highlight feature as a way to flag and harvest valuable comments
• Trigger DISQUS sync on new post event
• Bridge highlighted post to twitter account on highlight event in client
• Facebook compatible DISQUS Widget for canvas apps
• unhighlight comments from wp
• and many more features …

Some of the features exploited were probably not intended to be used like this by the DISQUS developers but a mashup is a mashup – no rules apply. The best thing is that the DISQUS Client and/or the widget wrapping it can be hooked into any other website to harvest comments = content. It works flawless in facebook also replacing the facebook wall as a canvas app – HA!!! Im so excited to see if it works the way it is intended to … it has been just released BETA yesterday.

If the service runs stable im thinking of rolling out the DISQUS comment sync as a wp plugin for all those who do not like the official plugin and hardcode the client into their posts, pages or implemented them in their templates. lets see …