Trying the Disqus WordPress Plugin

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I’ve been keeping an eye on Disqus, the blog commenting system, for many months now. I stumbled upon one of their blog posts today announcing that their new version came with a WordPress Plugin.

Two main things have been bothering me with Disqus:

1. I want to keep control of my comments on my server, not outsource them (maybe I’m being silly about this, but well)
2. I don’t want people commenting to be able to delete or edit their comments after publishing them, because it potentially can wreak havoc in the discussion thread if people aren’t careful about it. OK for cosmetic or “15 minutes after” modifications, but not 1 week later.

The WordPress plugin announces “Auto-sync of comments with Disqus and WordPress database”. Sounds good. Time to try Disqus here on CTTS.

First, I had to claim my blog withing Disqus. Failing to do that resulted in a bunch of server errors when I tried to follow the link to integrate Disqus into my blog (seems they are using the same unfortunate vocabulary coComment chose ages ago). Well, Climb to the Stars is now claimed, and has a community page on Disqus.

I finally found out how to download the plugin (it would be nice to make it available through the WordPress Plugin Directory, guys) and installed it, after backing up my database (daring, but not completely dare-devil).

I didn’t bump into any problems installing it, all went smoothly. I’m just a bit perplexed by this:

Will Disqus put new comments into my WordPress database too? It seemed to me that it would do that (“Autosync”) but now I’m not so sure anymore.

I’m not too happy about how trackbacks are being treated on the community page for CTTS:

I know my implementation of “similar posts” messes up the trackback/pingback excerpts, but at least WordPress puts everything on one line. Note also the encoding issues. (I hope the problem is on Disqus’ end, and that I’m not back in encoding hell once again — in my opinion, though, Disqus should be able to deal with any encoding thrown at it.)

I’m also wondering how Disqus and Akismet play together (not to mention Bad Behavior). Can anybody shed some light on that?

At the moment, I’m waiting to see if all my existing comments are getting imported or not (things seems stuck at roughly a week back). I’m also waiting to see what happens with new comments (do they go into my WP database? do they have encoding problems? can people edit them 1 week after commenting?)

The encoding issue is a showstopper (either Disqus fix it, or if it’s on my end, it means I need to go back into encoding hell, and there is no way I’m doing that before October. The “edit comments 1 week later” issue is also a showstopper — I imagine there should be a way for the blog owner to prevent this, but I haven’t found anything in the Disqus admin.

So, I’m leaving the plugin in for a little while, but chances are I’ll have to remove it.

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