It’s no secret that for every insightful feedback or comments you’ve received on the internet there’s going to be at least 10 more that are downright unconstructive. Whether it’s in the form of trolling, incendiary rhetoric or questionable stories of how Jenny earns $8,000 a month working from home and can now afford a brand new Mustang GT, pointless feedback has always been a problem with the internet. If you’ve ever spend some time inside Reddit and 4chan, you should already know firsthand how chaotic the internet can be when let loose, as the veil of anonymity it provides allow users to deflect consequences, a luxury real life does not provide. A glance at the Gamergate harassment scandal from a few years ago should leave no doubt to just how toxic the internet can be.
The biggest critics are in the online comments
Things have gotten so bad in the last few years that a couple of prominent publications decided to remove comments entirely, partly because the discussion itself has shifted to social media platforms and partly because it can easily devolve into an anarchy only with the slightest instigation. It’s not totally uncalled for but such blanket movement does severely restrict a website’s capability of fostering a community and negating users from being able to have a two-way conversation with the writers themselves, as I know from personal experience. Take for example, the music blog Stereogum, where a close-knit community around its regular commenters and the writers has formed thanks to the site’s regular interaction with its community and fostering them through a regular weekly roundup of the most and least-liked comments.
Now, if you’re just starting a WordPress website, it’s not very likely that you’d have the resource to create a specialized comment section of your own, not that you have the required community to support it anyway, so your choice would strictly be limited to plugins. There are a number of choices available for your web developers when it comes to this, some coming with more bells and whistles that you’ll ever need while others are barebones and anonymous so as to encourage impulse feedback. As it’s impossible to do an overview on every one that’s available, I’d limit my coverage into 4 of the more popular ones.
- Native WordPress plugin
Simple, straightforward and as sophisticated as a doorstop. The native WordPress plugin is bundled within the core WordPress platform and as such remains the go-to choice for a lot of spartan webmasters out there. The only requirement for commenting is users are required to leave their name, e-mail address and optionally, their website but as there is no confirmation required, it practically allows anonymous comments and as such, it has made a name for itself as a breeding ground for spams. To top it all off, the native plugin does not allow threaded comments, no notification for commenters, no comment edits and its Achilles heel, no upvotes and downvotes, depriving our society of instant gratification from their primary lifeblood. It’s definitely usable but should probably be used solely as a stepping stone for better and bigger things.
- Jetpack comments
Jetpack is one of several enhancements available for the native WordPress comment plugin and arguably the most popular. While it doesn’t fundamentally change how commenting work, it is after all an enhancement to the native plugin, it adds several useful functionality that improve the experience. Jetpack adds social media logins, enabling users to comment using their Twitter, Facebook or Google credentials while still allowing anonymous comments, providing a compromise between both worlds. Additionally, Jetpack allows for response notifications, making it easy to start a discussion between commenters. The problem with Jetpack is that the comment plugin is bundled with several different plugins that you might not want to use even though the comment plugin itself is light enough to not seem intrusive to your website.
- Facebook comment plugin
This one’s self-explanatory; the Facebook plugin basically turns your commenting platform into a Facebook wall and all its functionalities. That means the like button, a reply button for threaded comments and the ability to sort comments based on newness or likes. As with everything Facebook, you are required to have and login into your Facebook account to leave a comment, which could limit your audience as even with 2 billion users worldwide, Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal and data privacy issues has left users somewhat nervous about the social media giant. Still, this restriction also means that you could cut down on spams as anonymous comments are impossible and Facebook has been doing a relatively good job shutting down spam accounts. The thing is, Facebook’s comment plugin isn’t the easiest to integrate so unless you have a web developer on standby, stick to other plugins in this list.
- Disqus
By far the most fully-featured and popular third-party plugins out there, Disqus is used by a lot of mid-tier websites (popular websites that aren’t big enough to warrant a specialized comment section) such as gaming-focused Destructoid and pop culture magazine Entertainment Weekly. Disqus has all the necessary features: comment edits, threaded comments, social media logins, upvotes and downvotes and response notifications. What makes Disqus different is that it acts as a social network platform of its own, enabling commenters to see the profile and comment history of other commenters (as long as it’s not set to private) and follow them to see what they have to say across all sites that use Disqus.
As a dedicated commenting plugin, Disqus offers a lot of functionality that comes with the territory. Disqus is one of the few to offer support for other media, with image and video linking being supported but also offering users to hide them if seeing the same memes over and over again is not their thing. Disqus also allows for administrator moderation, either by the site administrator regarding problematic comments or by Disqus’ automatic spam filter, and self-moderation, enabling users to block other users so that any other comment from that user will be hidden from view. These fancy features come with two major caveats though, Disqus can be slow to load and the free version is bogged down by ads, requiring you to step up to the premium plan of US$9 a month to go ad-free.
So, which one should you go for? That mostly depends on your needs. Disqus is by far the fanciest of them all and is objectively the second-best feature outside of having a specialized comment system of your own but is only free with ads. Enhanced WordPress plugins like Jetpack offers just enough features to keep them from being primitive but still leaves you vulnerable to spam. Facebook plugin is a middle-ground, it has more features and Facebook’s ecosystem already has a way of handling spam but ongoing issues with the platform isn’t likely to sit well with a number of users. You could always start with the simpler ones and move on to Disqus or a specialized comment system down the road but I should point out that such systematic changes aren’t always going to sit well with some users. Figure out which features you need and what limitations you could live with and choose accordingly.