Disqus: possibly improving?

Um, so, serious question, kind of.

What would it take to develop a system to compete with Disqus.

Because I am all over the marketing for that.

"Are your loyal readers Disqusted with your comment system?"

We've got a tagline for marketing, an idea, let's VC this thing!

As I've said before, commenting systems are pretty common. Just about any blog/CMS software comes with one, probably with several others available as plugins, any reasonably good web programmer could roll their own. (Heck, I probably could, if I knew anything about web design). There are other big cloud-based ones, like LiveFyre or IntenseDebate.

However. Capacity, stability/availability, scalability and security are Not Easy. The AV Club publishes dozens of articles a day, some articles attract hundreds of comments within minutes, others have reached hundreds of thousands. You don't want that one Community article to take half an hour to load, you don't want a controversial Newswire to crash the whole CMS because hundreds of people are all commenting at once. You don't want your naive programmer to leave a flaw that allows someone to hack the security and expose everyone's login details.

Spam is a huge problem. I suspect that while Disqus is a long way from being perfect it actually does a pretty good job of preventing most spam.

Essentially, that's a feature, not a bug, since the whole point of Disqus is to allow easy commenting on multiple website. Short of requiring application essays for registering a new account there's not much to be done on the technical side.

However, speech communities practise their own methods of controlling expression. If you've ever read the AVC's old commenting policy you can infer that a lot of behind the scenes work was being done to police the comments. But once the ball got rolling and a speech community of over-educated hipsters was created, the commenters basically began policing themselves in implicit and explicit ways. Implicitly this was done by the relative level of erudition and wit displayed by the commenters, which demonstrated the type of speech expected for participation - basically, when you enter a new speech community you structure your speech according to how others speak, unless you're a clueless or egocentric ass, and many visitors to the AVC were probably turned off at not being able to reference Truffaut and Samurai Jack in the same sentence (and let's not forget that only a minority of people comment in the first place). Explicitly the comments were policed by the way commenters would pile on whenever a newbie would say something egregiously out of line by pulling out the snark and the bizarre gimmick accounts.

So that's what you can do to keep the AVC weird, which is basically keep doing what you were already doing: be erudite, be witty, be verbose, be snarky, and be bizarre.

Upvote notifications? Shit, that's going to get old so fast.

I am suddenly getting upvote notifications, and some are for comments I posted years ago. Many I don't remember the comment I made, even with the brief quite, and clicking on it takes me to the article, but not my comment.
What the hell good is that?

I got that too. What's happened is the redesign has caused the web addresses of all the old articles to change. However, it looks like Disqus stored the old url for that thread and it didn't get updated by the redesign, so you get a notification for the old URL.

If you really want to see the comment, you have to do a bit of work - copy the comment anchor (that's the "#comment-4958839839"), find the original article via search or the TV Club Find Shows widget, then paste that anchor back on the end of the new URL.

So how do we turn off the upvote notifications? They're pointless and I don't like them.

I said that but ganews didn't agree, does he know how many upvotes the populars get? This has "major problem" written all over it but I reckon that unless you have a Disqus account or merged your site account with a Disqus account, you're not going to be able to turn them off. Yknow, short of them noticing the idea is stupid on larger communities with a thing for Simpsons quotes.

So . . . do you get downvote notifications too?

Is your account a Disqus or AVClub only account? I have an AVC only account and can't switch them off, although I do see an option to.

I only ever made an AV Club account, but it somehow morphed itself into a Disqus account because I can see it on other websites.

Just logged in.

OUR LONG INTERNATIONAL NIGHTMARE IS OVER

Disqus is now not notifying me of responses - peculiarly, the ones I've found have all been responses in the two current Games newswires that have the now rote spam of controversial statements. It's even weirder as I still get upvote notifications from the same newswires - I have no idea what's up with Disqus' priorities now but it's irksome.