Site News: Let’s Disqus commenting

After a lot of deliberation we’ve hit the switch and moved our commenting system to the much-requested Disqus today. How did we get here?

Since we moved to WordPress VIP a few years ago, we’ve been using WordPress built-in comments for a number of reasons:

• Speed. Comments load instantly even on mobile.
• Integrated comments become part of the story
• It is quicker/easier to mod 1 system rather than 2. We comment on our stories with the same account as our author accounts
• A bunch of other little things

Unfortunately, that’s where the love story with WordPress comments kind of ends. Automattic, the company that runs WordPress, almost never updates their commenting system – and from what we’ve heard, no big updates are coming.

Meanwhile other commenting systems are evolving with great features like voting, lots of nesting, cross site promotions, excellent mod tools and other features that make commenting much better than the WordPress default. Of the big commenting systems, Disqus feels like the best out there and is certainly the most requested by our readers. We spent a lot of time and ‘intense debate’ on the decision, which is why it took such a long time.

So here we are.

If for some reason you aren’t already signed up, get a Disqus account and meet us in the comments!

(All of the old post comments will remain open and on WordPress comments. Moving forward, all new posts will be Disqus.)