So you have done making some great content for your fully optimised website. Well done. But you are thinking about implementing a high reputation good comment system in your site, are you? Why I recommend Disqus to you, and what are the pros and cons of using Disqus. Look no further, you are in the right place.

We need comment system because we need to build audiences from cold traffic into, hopefully, a crowd of big & hot community. The main reason of why Facebook so successful today is because of connection. Facebook connects your friends to you and making the whole world easier to talk to each other miles away. In other words, people love to discuss and share their thoughts, whatever the topic is, hot or cold, attractive or nah, doesn’t really matter.

What is Disqus?

Disqus is a 3rd-party mature blog comment hosting service that serves hundred millions of user worldwide. Founded on 2007, it’s ranking #1 and used by 75% of website according to a study. Disqus offers a pack of cool features including customised theme, 70 languages, intuitive moderation styles, photos/videos support and useful analytics. Also, Disqus provided a very simple way of integration into your site. The best part is, Free of charge! In fact you can even make money with Disqus which we will then discuss later in this article.

Disqus is 100% mobile optimised, it can be used on any mobile devices at your liking. For Disqus example, you can check out the images below. You can choose the color of background to fit the style of your theme, by default it comes with light and and dark, you can set it to “auto” to let Disqus decide for you.

How to Get Started

To get started, simply click on the “Get Started” button located at the top right corner to either sign up with your social media account or using an email address. After that, follow the instruction to login to your account.

Now, if you are looking to implement Disqus into your site, WordPress in my case,
1) Click on the drop-down gear button at top right corner,
2) Choose “Add Disqus to Site”, scroll down to the page and click on get started on “Ready to install Disqus”, follow the straight-forward instruction which will bring you to a page where to create a Shortname. You are halfway done, now, here is the tricky part.

Disqus Shortname

I was working on a plugin which asking me to provide my Disqus Shortname and Disqus API Key. I was confused at first and wasted one hour trying to find my Disqus shortname on Disqus.com under my profile but getting nowhere. To saved your time, after you have created your Disqus site URL, https://boygadgets.disqus.com/ in my case. boygadgets will then be my Shortname for my site in Disqus, instead of the whole URL or ID or Username.

Also, you can find your shortname on:
https://yoursite.disqus.com/admin/settings/general/

By the way, to get Disqus API key is relatively easy, here is the link to the application.

How to make money with Disqus?

You can make money (or advertise) via the Disqus ads. Its called Reveal. If your blog is pretty famous and well received a lots of comments from your audiences, Disqus helps to turned  your community engagement into cash, giving you another option to monetise your site further.

The idea is placing native ads above, within or below the comments section naturally, while you can choose the ads type to be sponsored story or sponsored links. Here you can learn more on how to earn money through Disqus. However, you will need to meet those eligibility criteria and get approved by Disqus before you can apply for Reveal.

Disqus Forum

Engage

After you have created your unique links, for example yourwebsite.disqus.com , you will be directed to admin moderation panel where you can moderate, analyse and configure your community discussion all in one place. On the top menu bar, clicking on the “start” button will show you the overall idea of post engagement, comments as well as your Reveal earning (if enabled).

Channel

You can create your own on-site channel. Channel works like any other ordinary forum for a specific open topic discussion with other community members on Disqus. Since this is only use within Disqus , no external site integrated required.

Disqus Plugin

Install the Disqus plugin to your site using your unique URL. You can choose to display the comment widget on your site too. If you are not a fans of WordPress but using Joomla instead, you can download the latest version of Disqus here. Meanwhile, one of the biggest drawback of using Disqus is actually their upsetting loading speed. Many developers complaint about the loading speed which are not getting their problem solved for a prolong period. If your disqus is not loading, try to fix it with their official solution. alternatively, you might want to reach out to their support to get the problem fixed.

Disqus Comment count

If you would like to display the comment count, there is an easy way to do it using JavaScript code snippet.

<script id=”dsq-count-scr” src=”//SHORTNAME.disqus.com/count.js” async></script>

Change the SHORTNAME to your unique registered name, and paste the code at the bottom of your home page, before the closing body </body>. Attach #disqus_thread to the end of your article URL inside the href tag. You can learn more here.

Remove “also on” Discovery links

Sign in to your disqus.com account > Click Admin > Go Setting > Choose the Website > Tick off the Discovery option > save it and you are all done.

You can delete Disqus account under “Advanced” scroll down to see a “Delete site and comments” button.