Ya'll, Disqus sent me an email today saying they're rolling out the 2012 version of their commenting system and do I want to upgrade? (More details, including a demo, here.)
The bulk of the new features I can already tell you that we probably aren't going to use. Comments aren't threaded here, so all the threading improvements are moot. I've noticed that no one here really uses the up-vote features (i.e., the Like button), and that wouldn't change the comment order anyway, so piffle.
On the other hand, the "load 3 more comments" would potentially be nice rather than having to hit F5 and wait. And I know that Old Disqus doesn't work so well at some of ya'lls places of home/work and maybe New Disqus will. And that would be nice.
On the third hand, I assume the upgrade will eventually be pushed whether we want it or not. But if we do "early adopt", I have no idea if we'll be able to revert back later.
So. Disqus upgrade. What do you think? (Has anyone tried it on their site? Can we see it? Post a link if you don't mind!)
14 comments:
One thing I like about "likes" is that it tells you who does the liking (if said person is logged in) and as such it feels less like a popularity contest (look who got the most votes) and more like a way to say that you, personally, liked something without having to make a post that consists of nothing more than, "I liked this." It's a way to contribute without bogging things down.
I tend not to use it very much, but when I see that people liked something I always check to see who they were.
It looks to me like new-disqus removes this entirely. You've got up votes and down votes but, as near as I can tell, absolutely no indication of who made them. Much more about popularity, much less about contribution.
If it auto-loads new comments, or just shows you that there are new comments to load, that would be awesome and worth changing for. I don't care about likes or up or down voting and don't use them.
My concern would be: Disqus is already really, really slow to load. Will this make it worse? (Can it even get worse?)
The thing I like least about Disqus (at least as used in this site - I'm not an expert on blog comment systems) is that Mobile Safari won't let me copy text from comments, no matter how much I zoom in. The post, sure, but not the comments. Which gets frustrating when people are discussing spoilery things in ROT13 and I want to paste them into a decoder. Desktop browsers are fine, it's just the mobile one as far as I can tell. If the new version fixed that, it would make me very happy.
You should be able to test that on the demo version.
I find the new version of Disqus to be visually appalling. But that may just be me. Also, as far as I can tell, it hates Mobile Safari just as much as this version. Possibly more.
It occurs to me that I have a test board in place already for testing HTML and widgets and the like, so I've installed Disqus 2012 there.
Please feel free to fiddle here: http://anamardolltest.blogspot.com/2011/11/this-is-another-test-post.html
Feedback would be very welcome.
UGH UGH UGH.
From the Disqus 2012 FAQ:
Currently, the following features from Disqus Classic are now set as the following defaults:
1. Pagination: always enabled and in Append Posts mode. I.e., a "Load More Comments" button always appears.
2. Postbox location: always at the top.
3. Sort order: sort order is a user setting (via cookie) and is not admin customizable.
4. Threading: reply comments are always "nested" and cannot be loaded as a "flat" thread.
I LIKE THIS NOT AT ALL. :-( Apparently they're open to evolving.
It also seems to have broken your recent comments sidebar.
Threading: reply comments are always "nested" and cannot be loaded as a "flat" thread.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
So you can't turn off nesting, but can you turn off replying? We could maybe do it strictly the old-fashioned way.
Pagination: always enabled and in Append Posts mode. I.e., a "Load More Comments" button always appears.
I thought that's how it already was. It's just set to the largest page setting (250 comments/page) so it hardly ever gets a chance to kick in.
You may definitely try out the new Disqus 2012 platform and have the ability to switch back. If you prefer the old platform, you can go to the top of the Admin page to Settings > General to disable Disqus 2012. I hope you are open to testing it out and that it runs smoothly on your site!
Any feedback you have on our new platform may be sent through our feedback survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/5RBPTTZ
hello house
Yeah, that's right. I just needed a bit of an assurance for the matter. Thanks!
I tested that on a demo version, it was not successes. So I think it is better to use old platform.
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