A week or so back I write a post on the back of the Intense Debate acquisition that was quite critical of third party blogging services. Honestly I didn’t really get the point. Now I’m here to say I’ve changed my mind, and to explain why.

Let me ask you a question: Are you looking forward to the comment changes in 2.7?

Are you interested to see how Intense Debate will give you more comment options?

Why wait?

I’ve been using Disqus on four blogs for a few weeks now and there are a few things that it provides that I really love, especially in light of the upcoming 2.7 changes.

The main features that Disqus provides are:

• Threaded comments
• In-admin replies
• Cross site commenter reputation (helps with spam)
• Paged comment screens
• choose any comment order you want on your blog
• Avatars
• Comment rating
• Comment editing
• Reply by e-mail or mobile (I don’t how them mobile stuff works)
• Easy reblogging of comments.

For WordPress, Disqus integrates really well. When you install the plugin you have the option to import all your comments into Disqus so not only do you not lose the old comments, they are displayed in the same way as the new ones, and your WordPress admin still shows your comment counts and new comments in the dashboard.

I particularly like that I can see the comments form all of my blogs on one page if I want to.

I also find it nice to simply hand over the theming aspects of comments to Disqus. The fact that the plugin simply replaces the standard comment form without needing any theme changes is great and I like knowing that I won’t have to make any changes to my theme when 2.7 is released, and almost inevitably any changes that happen in 2.8.

It is surprising just how satisfying it is to go through the WordPress plugins page turning off all the commenting plugins. No more Akismet, Subscribe to Comments, Ajax Edit Comments, Comment for Humans, etc and more

Using Disqus has genuinely been very easy and satisfying and I do honestly think that it is helping me engage better when people comment on the blog. At least I hope that is your experience of it. So, without wanting to come over all conspiratorial on you, I urge you to give it a try, even if it is just on a test install on the back of your domain ( I don’t think it will work on a local server ), before Intense Debate becomes the de facto default for WordPress blogs and before you have to make theme changes under 2.7.

If you have tried it what did you think? If you haven’t then let me know how you think it changes this blog: for the better? or do you find commenting harder or less satisfying than previously.