Nov
24

Commenting System Battle: IntenseDebate vs Disqus

web design | , , , | Comments

Recently, there’s been quite an up stir on commenting systems. And rightfully so, as comments are very important to bloggers. Since we’re in the times of “following” others online in any social network available, it only seemed inevitable that social commenting systems would come. Welcome Disqus and IntenseDebate.

What they provide:

  • Comment Threading
  • Comment Tracking
  • Comment Ranking/Rating
  • Posting to Twitter
  • Commenter User Profile
  • e-mail Replies
  • Comment Spam blocking
  • FriendFeed integration

These services provide a nice and easy way for you to manage your commenting on other blogs. So you can just log into the system and comment without having to fill out the normally required form fields.

Supported platforms include:

  • WordPress
  • Blogger
  • Tumblr
  • Movable Type
  • TypePad
  • Drupal
  • b2evolution
  • Graffiti
  • Joomla
  • RubyGem

Does this sound too good to be true?

As with all things, there’s always some negatives. In these cases, in order for you to use your Commenter Profile, the blog you’re posting on has to have the system installed on it. And with that comes a price. And that price is Styling. Or to be more specific, lack of full CSS customizability. Disqus does offer some custom CSS, but no where near as customizable as your traditional blog comments. You’re pretty much stuck with the style that they come with. For better or worse. Chris Coyier of CSS Tricks touches on this in his 1 week review of IntenseDebate. Another problem is that there isn’t a standard choice for the platform. While this isn’t really a problem. It means, as a commenter you may need to have an account on both commenting systems. If you so choose of course.

It is also important to note that commenters may still leave comments without having an IntenseDebate or Disqus account. It’s merely another option for them.

Enter the Dark Horse

While not a direct competitor to Disqus and IntenseDebate, BackType is another system that has recently picked up some steam. There was a rather length debate on FriendFeed as to where BackType fits in. The main reason as to why BackType doesn’t fit into direct competition is because it does not require you to install anything into your blog. Instead, it searches and aggregates all your comments into one place for you to share and view. It does this by searching the “Website” optional field when you submit a comment to another website. BackType also allows you to have a Commenter profile and “follow” other commenters. It does not have a login capability so that you don’t have to fill out the required and optional fields. And you must fill out the “website” field accordingly in order for it to attribute the comment to your profile. Louis Gray has quite a few write-ups on BackType on his Disqus-powered blog.

Okay. This is great and all, but which one do I choose?

Well, the answer to that is of course. It depends. If you use FriendFeed, all 3 of these are supported and can be imported into your feed. If you’re searching for a system for your WordPress blog, I would probably choose IntenseDebate as it was recently purchased by WordPress’s parent company, Automattic. Disqus does currently offer more platforms support. In case your platform is not supported by IntenseDebate. I’m looking at you Drupal and Joomla. Disqus also seems to be a more widely-chosen system. In case that matters to you.

Also, if you’re looking for reasons to use Disqus, Venture Capitalist, Fred Wilson offers you his 3 reasons. While Robert Scoble points you towards some Disqus enabled blogs and on the Disqus-only feature of Seesmic video comments. Keep in mind that version 2.7 of WordPress is just around the corner. And if you’re only looking into these systems for threaded comments, the new version of WordPress will have that built-in.

As for my recommendation. I say, as a commenter having a profile in each can’t hurt. But if you need to chose just one, I’d go with BackType. It supports both IntenseDebate and Disqus comments along with the blogs with neither of these.

What about you? What did you chose? What do you recommend? Are there other options out there?

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  • Nice writeup, John. I think at this point, many of the comment services are starting to provide very similar functionality. Disqus has been pretty good about leading the thinking, and it's natural for other services to begin delivering on what their users liked about Disqus.

    So that's why in the coming weeks, we're going to make it much easier for people to decide the better service for them. The new features in the coming release should be compelling enough and I really hope you'll find them useful as well.

    Also, Backtype is a different service altogether. We know the Backtype guys well and think they provide something very complimentary to what we do.

    - Daniel @ Disqus
  • Daniel,

    Yes, I totally agree that BackType is on a completely different place. And I have been very much enjoying Disqus and it's great service. It's also very reassuring to know that people at Disqus are willing to go out and respond to posts such as this one.

    Thanks for the comment and for the excellent product!
  • Thanks for the post. Glad to see you understood the various products and what they have to offer -- we're commonly labeled as a competitor to Disqus, but as Daniel said, we're very complementary and planning to work together (not against each other)
  • That's wonderful news Chris. BackType has been a pretty big topic the past 2 days on my twitter feed. Quite a few web designers getting very excited about it. It's great to know that you'll be working together with Disqus.
  • I've pretty much stopped commenting on blogs that don't use one of disqus or intensedebate.

    As a commenter, it almost seems rude. With custom comment systems, blogs are islands -- conversation only occurs while you're visiting that site. If I care enough about your content to comment, you should care enough about my comment to meet me half way.

    This is how I see these services -- half way between the audience and the site. Each takes a step towards the other and they meet in the middle -- in a safe place, where neither is stripped of power in the conversation due to arbitrary technical decisions.
  • Dustin,

    Interesting. I never thought about it that way. And of course, I do care about your comments. You do bring up an interesting topic of returning to the website to view a reply. Now I do wonder if Disqus and IntenseDebate are helping in bringing back commenters to follow up. What's your take on that? Do you return back to follow up on your comments if they were responded to?
  • Absolutely. If this had been many of the other blogs on the internet and you'd responded, I would never have even known, so I wouldn't be responding right now. :)

    It's this type of interactivity that you, the blogger should value. I, the commenter, do as well because I do actually like to engage in conversation when find things that are interesting to me.

    And to answer your original question, I choose disqus for my blog and migrated all of my old comments over to it. It was quite a good thing.
  • Dustin,

    That's great news. Thanks for responding back. How has using Disqus on your blog been going? Have you noticed a larger return of commenters or just the usual one-time commenters?

    Interactivity is definitely most valuable.
  • Couldn't really say. I don't post as much to my blog as I'd like.

    My primary reason for switching to Disqus was because it was getting harder to deal with comment spam and I didn't want to be working on what was already a solved problem.

    Disqus came at the right time for me, because it also sort of reached out to the users.

    A great example -- I don't have the slightest idea who you are, but I've been to this page at least three times now because you're talking about stuff that's at least mildly interesting to me. :)
  • Ah. I can see that. Since you're using Tumblr, I have no idea how well their comment spam blocking is. Judging from what you're saying though, it doesn't sound very good.

    All in all, I have been very happy with Disqus as well. And I'm glad that it has spurred up an actual discussion. Thank you for coming back and responding. As a fellow commenter, I'm always glad to get a response back from the author. And as an author, greatly value these types of constructive comments.
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