I don’t blame the bloggers who use WordPress.com or Disqus, for they are innocent pawns in something greater than they likely signed up for, but I am getting annoyed very quickly by both of these commenting systems.
Before I continue, some background is necessary if you are scratching your head:
Customer management solutions, most of which include blogging platforms — and there are many, from Blogger to WordPress to Typepad to Drupal to Joomla to Expression Engine — either use a built-in commenting system or allow the publisher/blogger to choose from an external selection.
Perusing blogs local to my home of Newburyport, for instance, Gillian Swart and Tom Salemi write on the Google-owned Blogger platform, P. Preservationist writes with Windows Live, and Mary Baker writes using WordPress.com. All of these blogs are using free blogging solutions. I appear to be the only local blogger with a self-hosted WordPress.org solution, which is essentially the same as WordPress.com except I can program in custom functions for a more enriching experience.
But this post isn’t about .com vs .org. For that, here’s more information on the difference between WP.com and WP.org blogs.
You recently shared with me why you like to receive comment notifications. If you add a comment to a Blogger or Typepad blog, any future email notifications you receive are based on optional boxes you check on those blogs. Ditto for self-hosted WordPress.org blogs like here that use the built-in WordPress commenting system. For these systems, if you choose to receive comments, you click a box and end of story.
But if you have a WordPress.com commenting system or a Disqus commenting system — see David Spinks and John Haydon, respectively, for an example of each — and I add a comment with the desire to receive subsequent comments by email, an automated email is sent my way, requiring me to click a link as a means of confirming that I am who I say I am.
WordPress:
Disqus:
I grasp the purpose of double opt-ins but if you comment on blogs a lot like me, it’s damn annoying. The only way to prevent the Disqus email confirmation is by signing up with a Disqus account (which I deleted yesterday for other reasons, which it now seems I’ll need to recreate) but there’s no way to prevent the WP.com email. Unfortunately, I know too many people who use the free WordPress solution and for whatever reason they don’t want to upgrade to the WP.org. It’s great to learn I’m not alone in my annoyance at WordPress, but it’s sad to learn nobody seems to know why this started out of the blue.
Short of not commenting on blogs with these commenting systems, what else to do? I guess I’ll grit my teeth and bear on. I once shared a similar annoyance with Typepad blogs, but that issue has since been resolved with an improved commenting system. I can only hope for a similar resolution here.
Related articles you may enjoy:
{ 31 comments }
Don’t get me started on Disqus. It’s a pissant of a program that sometimes causes my blood to boil as it slows down the loading speed of many blogs it’s used on as well as often misloading and having to be reloaded. I vow never to subject my blog’s readers to the torture of having to comment through Disqus on my blog.
.-= New from Gordie: Why Haven’t You Achieved Your Biggest Goal Yet? =-.
Hah. Anything else make your blood boil?
Strangely, I’m cool with disqus.
Intense debate, not so much.
JSKit – forget it.
Blogger and all the rest, forget it.
The world of super cool WordPress blogs with high quality unmoderated comments is now plenty large enough – and diverse enough – that I don’t need to comment anywhere else.
Last year, I tested out intense debate on one of my blogs. I hated how it hijacked my commenting system away from me. I had to log in to their system to deal with the comments on my own blog. I deleted the plugin right away, and never again used the account.
.-= New from Dave Doolin @ Website In A Weekend: As The Internet Evolves – Anonymity Go Bye Bye =-.
Stay away from Guy Kawasaki’s blog, then, for he uses JSKit.
What’s wrong with Blogger blogs, though?
I don’t like having to jump through hoops to leave a comment either.
Commenting should be easy to do.
Most of the sites I’ve been to with Disqus don’t seem to have a lot of comments..
.-= New from Glen: Blog Traps =-.
My site gets around 100+ comments a post and I use Disqus, we’ve seen a 5 Fold increase in comments since installing it and our readers/commentators love it.
I also disagree based on perspective. If a blogger employs Disqus or Intensedebate it’s usually because s/he recognizes frequent commenters are using other social media services and like to track themselves around.
I use the stand-alone version of WP but am new at blogging. I would have opted for the free version (for ease of use as a newby) if it weren’t for the help of my son (lol). Most new/non-bloggers may not be aware of the annoyance, but those of us who are in that zone may be hyper aware of it.
Nonetheless, perhaps if we help these sites understand the annoyance, they may change their platform(s). I for one will be happy to send over the suggestions. There’s power in numbers.
Where to go when the eggs begin to stick to the nonstick pan
.-= New from Jackie Kurtz@Bakeware Pans: Nordic Ware =-.
Can’t hurt. Are you going to designate yourself as the letter writer?
I think that commenting should just be an added conversation based on the original content of the post. So the issue of having to confirm and do extra work to be able to participate or follow the conversation is a bit ridiculous.
I think the easiest thing to do would be to email their support, however, depending on the blogging platform, their customer service may be a bit stiff or even nonexistent.
.-= New from Geoff Girardin: @TimeProject =-.
Scroll up one comment. Jackie’s volunteered.
Sounds annoying. I wasn’t even aware that wordpress.com start doing that. I’m moving mine to wordpress.org but wouldn’t you know it, I was planning on using disqus. I really like how disqus works and imo, once you have a disqus account, it makes commenting a lot easier…pretty much NO hoops.
That’s just my take. I’m going to try out disqus on my blog…if I hear that a lot of people don’t like it, I’ll remove it.
David
Scribnia.com
.-= New from David Spinks: If you register your site for free at =-.
Before you make the conscious decision to apply Disqus, run some metrics and confirm none of your commenters are using mobile devices. Because, last I checked, BlackBerry users are unable to add comments on Disqus-powered blogs. I don’t know about iPhones and other devices.
It’s to use disqus, and I find it very interesting, user-friendly, attractive, and simple. However, CommentLuv doesn’t work with it, that’s the only bad thing I’ve found in Disqus and IntenseDebate so far.
.-= New from Aminul Islam Sajib: WordPress.com Lets You Insert Adsense =-.
Minor inconvenience if one prefers commenting. Rumor has the Disqus folks working on a fix.
Just sign up for a wordpress.com account it rids the annoying confirm message.
As it is spam prevention after all.
And ya I hate disqus..so tedious.
.-= New from Brad: Top 5 myths about Google =-.
Ahhh… that makes more sense now, as I started seeing the confirm messages around the time I switched computers and probably never got around to logging in there. Thanks Brad.
Stuck between a rock and a hard place. I share your reaction towards comment systems. When I leave comments on websites I like to be notified about replies.
However, if you do this a lot, particularly on busy sites, your inbox gets completely clogged with notifications. So it becomes a trade-off – notification versus stuffed inbox.
True. Which leads back to something I wrote the other week about the similar trade-off between subscribing to all comments on a blog post vs only replies to whatever you write.
By “Customer management solutions”, don’t you mean “Content management solutions”?
.-= New from John Haydon: How To Create An Incentive For Visitors To Fan Your Facebook Page (Day 17) =-.
Don’t solutions manage customers, e.g. comments, as well as content?
The advantage I see in using Disqus is the fact that it collects “Reactions” from Twitter and such, but separates them from the actual conversational comments being made on the blog. On the flipside, one point that Danny Brown made about why he’s ditching Disqus last December was because of the lack of control over the comments (how it’s not stored on site) as well as issues of spam becoming problematic. There were other points Danny brought up, but for me it came down to it not being worth having all these issues just to segregate comments from “Responses”.
I see here, though that you’re using Chat Catcher. What’s been your readers impressions of it in terms of dividing up comment streams? Would be interested to find out if there’s been any.
.-= New from Tanveer Naseer: Why Better Will Always Beat Perfection =-.
Any commenting system can include such “reactions” separate from comments such as these. In fact, I’m amid determining if I feel like re-coding part of this blog core to do just that.
I just put Disqus on my blog. It was easy. Easier than upgrading to 2.9.1 my blog is old and has hundreds if not 1000s of comments to import. I curious to see if I’ll get more comments, generally only me and a few people I know comment. I get the odd stranger on my personal blog. We just started a new blog for my employer and I was thinking of running Disqus so I’m guinea pigging it on my blog.
I’m not sure why you’re so anti WordPress and Disqus I definitely don’t feel like a pawn. I put up my first webpage in 1995 so I’ve seen things come and go and I’m definitely a WordPress guy over Drupal for most uses especially. I like both .com and .org and use both. A couple blogs I comment on switched to Disqus, I investigated, I compared the alternatives, I made the switch. I used to have subscribe via emails to comments, but it was under used. I spent a tonne of time on my template trying to get OpenID, Comvatars etc. to work then they were implemented into WordPress, I think Facebook Connect is the really important feature, that and integrate spam fighting. Disqus is kinda a one stop shop for commenting and supposedly I keep my comments in my local database so I can go back…
The email message that appears to folks who don’t have Wordpress.com accounts is unknown to Wordpress.com bloggers because they don’t subscribe to their own posts’ comments. That’s the crux of my argument against wordpress.com blogs.
I just think for the average no technical person, DISQUS is easy to use and having left something like 100 comments on Bell Of Lost Souls I decided to give it a try on my personal blog then on the blog of the non-profit I work for. We haven’t had any problems it fit into both templates easy enough.
Cheers,
I totally agree – It’s best just for them to leave things simple. It takes what.. 5 seconds to enter what you want, then leave the comment. They are trying to make it easier to “share” info across blogs, but sometimes it does become so cumbersome that you end up losing comments and subscribers over something that should be easy to figure out and use.
.-= From James to you: RIP Gordon Lightfoot – 1938 – 2010 =-.
I feel that Disqus has enhanced the conversations, and their customer service is fantastic.Thanks to Disqus..
.-= From Jacee Thompson to you: Defining Technology =-.
After reading your blog post, I am still confused as to why you do not like disqus. I was searching the web trying to figure out if I could use disqus for a client on her free wordpress.com blog. I signed up, but nothing seems to have changed on the comments section. Wondering if I need to install the code in a widget or something. I don’t have a disqus account personally and it has never asked me for a double opt in e-mail confirmation when I comment on other blogs.
Yeah I do understand. But I think that we are not left with choices, unless you can create your own Commenting System that you want.
Count me as one of the persons who hate blogs using disqus.
I also hate that I have to login or have a separate account just for commenting. But I’m not saying that everyone hates it. Just explaining why I do.
(I reached this post via a search for “I hate blogs with disqus”) hehe
Comments on this entry are closed.