What is your favorite commenting system?

[lbdesign]

I'm hoping this will be a useful discussion that will help many bloggers.

I'm looking to standardize on what I recommend for a commenting system for bloggers and small publishers. Something that will keep out most spam while not requiring the owner to manually approve each comment, and hopefully something that will help them with traffic too.

I'm interested in trying Facebook, which has some plugins and also manual methods for integration. Then there is Disqus and Livefyre, and venerable Jetpack, and probably some others I'm not aware of.

I am not a big fan of using WordPress' built-in comments feature, and ideally, I'd like to NOT burden the WP DB with all the comments, though I'm not sure if that's a realistic demand.

So what are your favorites and why?
thanks!

[William]

I use Disqus, but there are reasons to keep the comments on your own site. From an SEO perspective, none of those comments live on your system. They belong to Disqus or Facebook, so they aren't being indexed by search engines on your site.

Many of these tools have ways to re-direct people away from your site. For example, Disqus shows an indicator when there are replies to your comment on its system. Those replies may be on another site, which takes viewers away from your site. Good as a user, not so good as a site owner.

Then there's the issue of load time. You put a piece of Javacript on your site, and then you wait to get served. However, both users and search engines measure your load time. You can't optimize the performance of someone else's site, so you take what you get.

Although I like Disqus from a user perspective, I'm seriously thinking about removing it from my sites.

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–William
http://williambeem.com

[lbdesign]

Thank you William! My experience has been that Disqus loads asynchronously, so if that's the case, does it still hurt google's analysis of your site load time?
I have used Disqus on one news site, and the owner likes it because moderation is less necessary. There is an option to automatically sync the comments into your wordpress database, but I'm not sure if those synced comments show up in a way that helps search. Do you know?

[Mealtog]

This is a heated topic. Consensus is, Disqus is powerful with antispam, coolness but WP default commenting yields more comments. If you do run Disqus using a plugin, I think comments also gets written to your WP database so if you ever decide to remove disqus, your comments are still there. Have not done this, just read it somewhere so better confirm this with the plugin developers.

[lbdesign]

Yes, I can confirm that it's easy to have Disqus dupe/mirror the comments into your WP database. So yes, you can dump Disqus at any point and retain all the comments for use with a local/built-in commenting solution.

[brankica]

I was just searching for some info on this one. I tried all of those systems, there are FB plugins that import comments to database. Disqus does slow the site a bit (just ran several speed tests on several websites). I liked Luvefyre real time feature for a bit but now I think it is only good for celebrity gossip 🙂
As far as spam goes, CommentLuv plugin/ GASP was amazing at blocking any spam until recently. Now, I get 400 spam comments in a day or so. Which is why I am looking into something else besides the default WP system 🙁

[Author]

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