Using Disqus for Blog Comments

From this post onwards, I’ve replaced the commenting system on this blog with the [Disqus Comments](http://disqus.com/comments/) system. Disqus is one of the breed of external comment providers that have become popular in the last year or so, that include Automattic’s [Intense Debate](http://intensedebate.com/), Six Apart’s [Typepad Connect](http://www.typepad.com/connect/) and [JSKit Echo](http://js-kit.com/).

Why have I chosen Disqus? Well, it’s the only one that syncs comments back to my Movable Type database right now, thanks to a [new version of the plugin](http://media.disqus.com/disqus-movabletype-2.0.zip) that was released with [Disqus 3](http://blog.disqus.net/2009/08/25/disqus-v3/). And that’s important to me. Should Disqus go away, or I decide to stop using it, I don’t want to lose the discussions around my blog posts. This way, I can easily revert back to the native comments without losing anything. It might seem counter-intuitive for companies to offer this, but, for me, it’s actually made me try out their service, which I’d never have used otherwise.

Beyond that, it’s nice for someone else to handle things like using Facebook or Twitter logins to leave comments on this blog. There are Movable Type plugins that handle this, but they need some integration work, and, frankly, I’d rather leave that effort to someone else. The service also offers commenters the chance to start tracking their comments through the Disqus Profiles service.

Unless anything horrific goes wrong, I’m planning to have Disqus on here for at least a month, to see how it goes. I’ll report back.