Some of you noticed that the blog has started using Disqus to manage our comments a few months ago and have written to ask why. Good question!

There is no one particular reason. I did it more to test things out and installed it on several blogs. Some blogs, it went through without any problem, but this one for reasons not made known to me the import didn’t go through in the beginning and I had to get support to work on it. They were reasonably speedy on the case so that was good.

Once imported, comments would appear both on Disqus and also saved in WordPress database. That way, if you ever turn it off, you won’t lose your comments. The comments area now loads a Disqus page in a frame.

What I like about Disqus as a blog manager.

• Reply by email LOVE this. If I have to choose one reason for staying with Disqus, this is it.
• Social network trackback. I got tired of making tweetback plugins work. I appreciate the hard work put in by devs of such plugins unfortunately none I tried performed reliably. Since all this is handled by Disqus, I have one less plugin installed and one less issue to stress over.
• Managing multiple sites’ comments from one interface. That’s always nice. I wish I could do both. Write and manage comments from one interface. Yeah I know you can use things like ScribeFire to write, but I am too much in love with WordPress’ new image cropping feature. Besides, managing blogs from one place is always good. That’s why I am seriously debating switching my blogs to WPMU. Not all sites (yet), but perhaps the smaller more content focused blogs.

So far all seems good. I have noticed some quirks here and there. Once the comment came in really late but it showed up inside the WP database and this week, I noticed one comment not on Disqus at all yet is in my WP database too. Maybe it was triggered by their upgrades a few days ago. Not sure. 99% of the time the comments come through without a hitch.