Commenting systems: Disqus vs Livefyre

disqus commenting livefyre

Commenting systems are the big thing nowadays. I think pretty much all sites should use something rather than rolling their own.

I chose to look at 2 that I've had experience with. There is also another one I have not yet used called Intense Debate.

So here it is, my review of the 2 site plugins with the worst names in existence.

Why are these tools better than having your own commenting system?

• Low barrier of entry for readers to comment
• Users may already have an account with the service
• Spam and moderation is much easier to manage
• Offloads work from the server
• Very easy to install
• Can show feedback that is happening on social networks
• Sorts comments by popularity and importance rather than recency

Disqus

I'm somewhat familiar with Disqus for other reasons. David Cramer is active in the Python/Django community and has built some awesome open source tools. So when the time came to integrate comments on my site, Disqus was the first thing I thought of.

Disqus is also very popular. You see it everywhere. This means it's likely users will already have an account and be more likely to comment.

The setup process was easy. I did a bit of work afterwards to setup some things like enabling local support, linking to the article rather than the url, and highlighting my own name on the comments so the readers can easily see my replies.

I love the design, and it is really easy to customize. The moderation tools are top-notch as well.

It went well. I really only have 2 complaints about Disqus.

First, since I use slugs for my articles, sometimes I change the names of them while I'm still writing them. When I do this, it messes up disqus a bit. The comments are still there, but users will get an email to the article at an old slug. This is really annoying and causes me to have to manually update the urls in their system (which requires uploading a csv for updates). It's really annoying.

I could remove the hard link via the article id's, but if I did that, the comments wouldn't show on my local box, and if I ever wanted to change a name after people started commenting, it would be lost.

My other issue with Disqus is that it's slow. Most of my site's total loading time of pages is with Disqus. The CSS stylesheet they use very inefficient. There may be more problems with their speed, but this is most likely a huge cause of the slow performance.

It's not so bad since it's on the bottom of my page. However, I like having an all-around fast site, and Disqus makes that impossible.

Livefyre

I tried out Livefyre today. They have a few more features that Disqus does not. The biggest difference between the two is that they really focus on heavy social functionality. I hear it works well and has good results in creating a lively community.

• Tagging of people on AND off the site. This can bring people into the site directly in the comments
• Captures conversations on twitter and facebook to bring all the conversation into the site
• LinkedIn integration, this is important for my audience
• Search engine crawlable, this is pretty cool too

I don't think it is wrong to argue that Livefyre has more features than Disqus.

So I decided to integrate livefyre on my blog to test it out.

The setup process was really easy. A little too easy though, let me explain. It's a 2 step process, put in your url, paste a simple code. You can get it running very quickly. Problem is, it doesn't tell you how to customize it. On Disqus, it was easy to define the article id and name, but with Livefyre they gave no indication on how to do either of these things. In fact, I'm still not sure if I can define the article name. They probably use the site title, but I would rather not use that since I always append 'by Jeff Dickey' on my site title.

I looked through the support on their site and found nothing. They have no documentation. Maybe they figure they don't need documentation because they're so easy to use?

Well, they're wrong, they definitely do need some docs. Preferably a link to them after the setup process. For getting the site to link to the article id's rather than the URL, I eventually guessed how to do it and got right. I sent in the key 'article_id' in the initializer, but that was a lucky freaking guess.

It also dumps a ton of console.log statements into the console. That might be okay if I wanted to debug Livefyre, or just didn't care, but if I had a javascript heavy app, that would be truly annoying.

It has no support for running the commenting system locally either. Disqus does this and clearly describes how to do it. I had to push it up to production and 'hope' it didn't break. (Oh and get this, it DID break)

This is definitely up there with the least developer friendly tool I've ever integrated on a site.

How developer-friendly a product is does not make or break a company, but you can bet after my experience how I would feel about suggesting a tool like this to a client.

The design in their internal site is odd too. Parts of it are pretty good, but then they had shit like this:

More inability to line up things:

Then, while browsing around on their site and clicking the Log In button, I got this:

Calling me a 'punk' for clicking your login button? You do have a 'dumb site'.

404 is the wrong error code from that description anyways. It should be 401 or 403. For someone that has worked on a lot of web sites, this is actually a clue into their system. 404's should be handled very differently than access denied codes. No matter what framework or platform they are on, this is telling me that they're totally reinventing the wheel with authentication, and that wheel is looking pretty square.

Obviously, I'm only drawing conclusions based on very small bits of what I've seen, but I would put money on Livefyre's code-base being just as flaky as their design. Disqus, on the other hand, I have seen their code (gargoyle and sentry), used it in production systems, and it's excellent.

The entire system feels unfinished. Maybe some of those design details seem small, but as a whole it feels really chintzy. Running into a bug when I click login did not help my stance on that.

The UX is terrible. To get to my site's moderation takes a ton of hunting. Like I said, I also never found a way to configure the code.

It's safe to say that I did not like the process of integrating Livefyre. Not at all. Disqus was good, not perfect, but good. I've yet to use Livefyre to actually moderate, but based on what I've seen so far, I'm not terribly excited about moderating.

I love the direction they are going. They seem to be ahead of the market as far as the product vision goes. It's a shame the product is in the state that it is in.

Summary

So I've yet to use Livefyre in-depth, but so far I feel like Disqus is the better option. Even though it's slow and has a bug that bothers me. It has a larger user base, I like the onboarding more, the design is much better. As an engineer, it genuinely feels more solid and reliable.

I could be swayed depending on how this social interaction that Livefyre has works out. If I find that people seem to chat much more with Livefyre, it may be the better option.

So I'm A/B testing them both, you'll see some articles with disqus, and some with livefyre. I'm just going to see what works out better!

EDIT: And would you look at that, I try and actually use Livefyre on my site, and it thinks it's running locally, actually, it's not even the right article! It thinks it's the Redis article. I have no idea how that even happened. The ID for this article was always correct. (Post a comment and see the url that it thinks the site is at). This is similar to the problem I had with Disqus, except that with Livefyre I have no clue how to fix it. I don't even think it is fixable. That was probably my last straw for that pathetic commenting system.