Working with WordPress is a mixed bag of tricks – between themes, plug-ins, third-party add-ons, web host configurations, and so on, there is a seemingly endless combination of options.
Perhaps that’s a bit of an exaggeration. After all, most of the available options play well together. Still, we’ve all had a few experiences that left us wondering what exactly happened after clicking the Activate button.
Sometimes, issues arise from bad code; other times, it’s from an honest lack of understanding the full impact of the change being introduced to the system. There have been a few issues that the team has seen consistently crop up when dealing with WordPress-based sites, so we’re trying to do something about it.
We’ve already taken a look at compatibility issues between themes and code, we’ll explore caching in an upcoming post, but let’s take a look at third-party commenting systems.
Comments are Crucial
There are a variety of reasons why we decide to venture into blogging, but it’s safe to say that many who decide to get into the game are looking to share their opinions and to engage with others. As such, comments are crucial to the blogging experience.
Within the past few years, there have been a number of third-party plug-ins that seek to enhance WordPress’ support for commenting. And succeed they have.
Because of these systems, it’s possible to leave comments using your email address, Twitter account, WordPress account, or others, and then have future replies sent to your inbox. It makes it incredibly easy to engage with others as the readership grows.
But Understand What You’re Getting!
By default, WordPress comments are kept in the same database as the rest of your blog’s content. In addition to the login and email support, these third-party systems store all of your comments on their machines.
Ultimately, this allows you to have a backup copy of your conversations and it allows these service providers to support many of the features that make them so useful.
Of course, whenever you outsource a component of your platform, you’re somewhat subjecting yourself to any problems that the third-party may experience during their day-to-day operations.
For example, if one of these providers has a storage problem on there end, you blog may end up losing comments during said outage. This is the nature of a service though – a lot of value is provided, but no organization is without fault.
Making The Decision
There are a number of a reasons to select (or to avoid) a third-party commenting system. Understanding the position of your blog can go along way in helping to make sure that you’re currently maintaining the best option.
WordPress’ out-of-the-box support for comments is excellent. Obviously, it’s part of the native application and it scales well for several thousand followers (in fact, this is what we use across all of our sites).
On the flip side, if your content is at the point where you’ve got thousands of readers and your comments are reaching into some high numbers, it may be worth considering moving to another system.
It’s also worth noting that much of the power that comes with these systems comes with a slight performance hit. As such, if you’re someone that’s hardcore about the load time of your page, take this into account.
Conversely, comments are typically loaded below the post so you may be comfortable getting away with having a slight delay in load time.
At any rate, engaging with users is fun and is what makes blogging worthwhile. Doing all that you can to provide your readers with a solid experience is important. Hopefully this will help you in making an informed decision what it may be.
Michael says
Okay, so this came at a good time. I’ve been considering using IntenseDebate, but I’ve heard the stories of it “eating” comments. I would just like something easier for people to use and for me to reply while on the go.
Tom says
The intent certainly isn’t to persuade anyone from using one system over another – just to lay out all the options on the table.
You’ll have to make the call based on the status of blog.
There are a few plug-ins that are helpful for notifying follow-ups via email, though. They’re always worth a look.
Mark says
I just flipped over to IntenseDebate on my blog so looking forward to how well it works.
except for the fact that at the moment i’m low on visits but that’s cause its dull right now.
Tom says
Sweet – hopefully it’ll get a bit more action 😉
Matthew Snider says
Nice write up Tom. To be honest with my larger movie website we have tried Intense Debate, Disqus and some other minor tweaks to comments. We average around 10 to 20 a day comments so we are not breaking any crazy records.
The down side for me was the lag on the loading of pages. I am at a place of work where they block lots of “pieces” of code rather than the whole thing. SO I must think about the end user who may be a couple of floors above me. I want them to see everything on my site. So as with facebook being blocked, I needed to think outside of the box. Unfortunately the outside looked just like the same old WordPress comment system. It loads fast and does it’s job.
The drain on page load times and the server itself was not worth it in my eyes.
Matthew Snider says
I forgot to add that intense debate here at work is blocked also, BUT just the java behind it. So it loads but the submit button is forever locked from us.
Tom says
Yep – performance and considerations for other users are exactly the kinds of things everyone needs to consider when assembling their blogs.
Good stuff, Matthew.
Yohan Perera says
I am not using any 3rd party commenting system because people rarely leave comments in my blog. However I know what you are talking about because of 3 problems I faced.
I publish PowerPoint sermons in my blog. I host my slides with Slideshare and use the embed code to embed the slides in my posts. Recently they updated their embed code and all the embed presentations in my blog disappeared. I had to update each and every embed code across my blog – in order to fix the problem.
Some time later, the slides stopped appearing when the blog was viewed through Internet Explorer. After some research I learned that the new embed code is not compatible with all the browsers. This was fixed after informing the support department. Fortunately I didn’t have to re-update the embed codes in my blog posts.
Most of my visitors want to download these PowerPoint files. Downloading directly from Slideshare requires registration. Therefore to make things easier I uploaded the PowerPoint files to 4Shared and published the 4Shared generated download URL in my blog posts.
Couple of days ago, broken links started appearing in my blog. The problem was 4Shared had updated the download links of each and every file hosted in their servers. The only way to solve it was updating the download links in my blog. Which was a pain.
Matthew Snider says
My point exactly, relying on 3rd party systems or code is a terrible idea. If you can, you want to host everything locally, or at least on Amazon s3 or something of that like.
With a movie website, my second baby, trailers a terrible. Do host them locally? Do you use Youtube and their terrible quality etc.
It’s a tough decision and one that needs to be well thought out.
Tom says
This is exactly the kind of stuff we’re attempting to evangelize here – just being aware of the dependency that you’re creating on your site when you out source to another service.
They bring a lot of value but you gotta know what you’re getting into.
Jim Gray says
so far, disqus has worked for discussion on diff blogs, intense debate was fun, but i’m not really sure.
Matthew Snider says
But have you noticed any up swing in traffic or more discussion due to it? I used it for a month both options and saw no increase of any kind. So the drain on server and load times wasn’t worth it.