Disqus Saved My Site!

I’ve been using the Disqus social commenting system for a well over a 2 month now. Since I’ve started using Disqus, I’ve written numerous articles with nothing but praises not only for the Disqus product, but also for the great support team behind Disqus. While Fred of A VC mentions 3 Great Reasons to Use Disqus, David Risely thinks it’s pointless and possibly stupid. That’s OK. I’ll give one story as to why installing Disqus was the smartest thing I could’ve done!

In his post, Risely noted some unmoving concerns for the Disqus commenting system:

So, could I bring the comments back into WordPress if I chose? From this discussion, it seems the answer is no but they are working on it. And what happens if Disqus goes the way of the dodo? Did I just lose everything? Also, it seems as if you can’t moderate your own comments inside WP anymore. Apparently, they are working on a plug-in for that. So, not only are all my comments now on a remote server, but I have to separately log into a remote server to moderate them?

His first question seems to be the only true reasonable concern one should have. For his second concern, if Disqus went bye-bye, yes your comments would too. However, last month Disqus didn’t go bye-bye for me. Instead, my domain did.

Disqus To The Rescue

Unfortunately, this couldn’t have happened at a more horrible time. Not only was SheGeeks beginning to break ground in the blogosphere, but I had absolutely no backups of ANY of the files of SheGeeks. None, zip, nada! After my previous domain went down, I did a mad scramble to get what I could with the help of a lot of the friends and developers that I’d made a connection with.

Since I use Windows Live Writer to publish my posts, a copies of each post are saved on my hard disk. Yes, I went through the majority of them to salvage what I could. However, my comments were gone. Oh, wait! Disqus has them! AWESOMESAUCE!

I immediately emailed the Disqus support team and within an hour I had a reply letting me know that as long as my link structure was the same, there wouldn’t be any problems changing the domain url and getting the comments back on the new SheGeeks. It worked like a charm! The End.

Bonehead Preferences

As for Risely’s last concern, I actually like moderating comments via my Disqus dashboard. It’s a lot more efficient and organized than WordPress’ management options. However, this concern is more of a personal preference rather than a substantial reason to not use Disqus. Over 10,000 blogs couldn’t possibly be boneheads, including this one.