Why you should NOT use Disqus on your site!

What is Disqus (pronounced discuss)? This is a service that purports to offer an embedded comment / discussion service to your blog or website. Seems like a good feature, but let’s explore why this service shouldn’t be used.

Discussion Forums

Any good blog site or article site should offer a way to allow for comments. However, I find far too many sites that don’t offer comments at all. This is not the focus of this article, but it is one of my pet peeves. Should you choose to add a discussion or comment service, you should not consider using Disqus at all. Why?

Every good discussion package should offer a way to moderate posts and see every post that’s been submitted to your article. I believe that while Disqus does offer moderation, it also has a built-in spam detection package that hides posts from you that have been detected as spam. The problem with using Disqus, is that not only is their spam detection heinously faulty by filtering out many valid posts as false positives, Disqus does nothing about it. This means that as a site owner, you could be losing many, many valuable and valid comments to Disqus’s spam detection system.

As a site owner, you won’t even get to see those detected posts to know they were even there. They are simply hidden in the user’s profile on Disqus who posted their comment. Secondarily, the person leaving the comment can do nothing to get their comment unspammed. Once it’s detected by Disqus’s spam filter, that comment is lost for all eternity. Disqus staff not only does not monitor these failures,  they do nothing about them. Disqus offers a comment platform and they can’t even do that job.

If a user clicks on the This is not spam button, nothing happens. The post is not reposted. No one at Disqus looks at the comment. No one approves it. So, the comment remains in perpetual limbo solely on the user’s Disqus profile.

Disqus as a Discussion Service

As a site owner contemplating embedding Disqus as a comment platform for your site, you want to know that your reader’s comments appear timely and fully. This is guaranteed not to happen with Disqus. You don’t want to use a half-baked discussion system thinking you’re actually getting to see all comments on your posts. With Disqus, I’d guess at least 50% of all comments left on an article are lost to Disqus’s extremely stupid spam filtering system. That number might even be higher than that. If you actually want to see all participation on your posts, you should find another system to enable comments on your articles. DO NOT rely on the Disqus platform as they WILL lose valuable comments from your readers… comments that you will never see.

If you really value reader feedback and participation, do yourself a favor and DO NOT USE Disqus as a platform. Until this company actually gives a damn about your users and actually gives you the tools to manage every user response (spam filtered or not), you should find another service to add discussion feedback to your articles that you post.

Better, lead your users your other social media site where open discussions are, in fact, permitted without the draconian spam engine that Disqus currently employs to hide and censor valid and valuable comments from you.