Increase Blog Comments And Traffic With Disqus Comments Plugin

Yesterday I wrote about the RPX WordPress plugin that allows users with facebook, twitter and other IDs to leave comments on WordPress blogs.  Just 24 hours later, I’ve replaced the RPX plugin.  There was nothing wrong with it; I just found a better plugin that provides more functionality and allowed me to remove 6 plugins on my site.

The Disqus WordPress plugin is similar in that it allows readers to leave comments using facebook, twitter, Disqus and OpenID IDs.  However, it provides much much more functionality:

• Threaded comments and replies
• Notifications and reply by email
• Subscribe and RSS options
• Powerful moderation and admin tools
• Full spam filtering
• Support for Disqus community widgets
• Connected with a large discussion community
• Increased exposure and readership

Now some of these features are already available in wordpress, but I think they work much better in Disqus e.g. the pagination options are much better.

The final feature I think could be very interesting.  Whenever someone leaves a comment using a twitter or facebook ID, an option is give to post the comment as a status update.  This could bring in additional traffic, particularly if the commenter has a big twitter or facebook following.

Installing Disqus has allowed me to replace 6 plugins on my site:

• subscribe to comments (defaults to subscribed)
• backtype connect
• clean notifications
• commentluv
• RPX
• ajax edit comments (because not supported)
• commentluv (because not supported)

Disqus also provide widgets that allow you to show in your sidebar top commenters, recent comments and popular posts.

The plugin is easy to install and even imports and syncs your old comments.  The only missing feature I think is allowing users to sync existing WordPress IDs.

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