New Version of Disqus, Some Clarification
Posted on May 15 2012 by David Van Komen
In case you hadn’t yet noticed, Zelda Dungeon has opted in to give the newest version of Disqus a try. This new version is still in development, as the Disqus team has only just released it for public use, and they haven’t even rolled it out to all websites yet. Be sure to send them some feedback on how you think this new version is going, as it will be permanent in about a month. To see what new features are included in this version along with Disqus’ official video, head inside the post where I will “disqus” them.
With this new version, as you can see in the video above, plenty of new features have arrived to help make the commenting community much better. As the Disqus team put it, “we started building a new Disqus to rethink what’s truly important for a discussion platform.” This new version has pretty much been redone from the ground up to ensure that you, our commenters, are happy with the platform.
The newest features of this platform are realtime comments, a community tab, a little dashboard for your personal account, and voting. I’ll go over each of the different features below.
1. Realtime Comments
No longer will you need to constantly refresh the page to see what other people are saying about a post. You can just stay on the page to wait for new comments to be posted, as you’ll get this neat notification that will let you know that there’s a new comment that you can view or reply to! With this feature, you can stay in on the action and actively discuss the topic that is at hand.
2. Community Tab
If you’re curious to see what is going on around the rest of our news posts, you can do that easily from the new community tab that can be found on every post. You can see the users that have commented the most, as well as see what is going on at that moment in other posts. I imagine that this is the section of Disqus that will receive the most new features and refinements as the development of this new version goes on.
3. My Disqus
If you’ve made a Disqus account (which I recommend you do, as it is free and can connect you across many sites on the web), you can see a little dashboard that will let you know if you have any new notifications, if the people you follow have commented recently, and several other things. In the old version, there only was a little notification drop down along with a dashboard on the Disqus website for you to view that information. Now, it is all in the same spot and very easily accessible anywhere you go.
4. Voting
This is the feature that I found was most missed when we made the switch from IntenseDebate to Disqus back in January. I read and reviewed many concerns during the switch that had to do with the voting system (thumbs up and thumbs down) being gone. With this new version of Disqus, the voting system is back. This system should be used to help find quality comments and threads, as Disqus has a few algorithms to sort through comments to bring the best ones up to the top. This does leave room for trolls to vote many things down, but if you users are active enough to vote up and down the comments, I’m sure that it won’t be much of a problem.
Final Thoughts
So, now that you know what the new features are, I urge you to check them out and give all of them a good try before you judge the new system. If you find any problems with the system, use the nifty “Send Feedback” option that can be found above every single Disqus thread. This version will be permanent in about a month, so make sure you voice your opinions to the developers before it becomes too late to help shape this new version.
I personally like the new system, as I was able to give it a shot the very day it came out via Disqus’ blog. I like to try new things, and I really feel that this version of Disqus will really help you folks interact with each other in better ways than before.
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