The native WordPress commenting system is the default installed system that every blogger should have. But, if you look around, there are thousands of bloggers who use many of the other systems.
The problem here is how to choose the best comment system for WordPress?
This can be a real issue, especially, for those who create a blog the first time and want to select the right way, we will talk about that today.
Is WordPress’s native comment system useful for all?
The WordPress native commenting system is simple, with just an email address and a website URL as an option. People can make a comment without the need to be logged in. At the same time, you will make things hard for people who never share their emails.
Even if it’s just for the comment and still secret, they won’t make a comment and leave the site. So, you will lose some of the comments that can add value to your posts and create discussions about them.
In other words, the WordPress commenting system will only focus on bloggers and website owners.
If your blog is just about webmaster content, and you see that only webmasters are interested in comments, then you can go with the default commenting system that comes with WordPress.
The JetPack comments
If you installed the JetPack plugin, you can install the new commenting system from there, it’s just an option that you can enable. You get an instant system that replaces the old one and make things more friendly.
The JetPack comment system is social and makes it easy for people to comment on using WordPress, Facebook, and Twitter accounts.
From the beginning of WordPress, until our days, social networking becomes more popular and millions of people have their preferred social account.
The smart idea here is to let people sign in with their social accounts, and this is what they want at the end. However, it’s not the case for many others who just want to make a comment and leave the website.
Of course, you should install an anti-spam plugin to avoid big problems with spammers.
The common thing between Jet Pack and the native WordPress comment system, is that the comments should be saved in the database, this is normal, but can cause problems if something happens to the database later, you can repair all that, but it needs more time, especially, with large websites.
Disqus
As you can see, lots of websites including CNN are using the Disqus comment system, for some logical reasons:
The Disqus commenting system is the biggest comment system in the World, there are millions of people who use it to make comments everywhere.
In the beginning, Disqus was really “selfish”, users need to open an account with them to be able to make a comment, and we come back to the problem that not all people trust a new website and create an account on it.
But things have changed, and Disqus becomes friendly and allows people to sign and comment with their social accounts like Facebook, Twitter, and of course Discuss.
The best thing about Disqus is that all the comments will be saved on their server, it saves space for popular websites with thousands of comments. At the same time, you can hide the comments to appear when loading the page, until the user scrolls down on the page.
This solution solves the slow loading time with lots of comments. As with any comment system, you can approve or delete comments directly from your WordPress dashboard.
I’m not going to list all the systems here, simply because I never used them in my blog, and it’s better to let people who are using them recommend or talk about their benefits.
Avoid spam commenting systems
You should make sure to investigate any system that you don’t know. There are many systems created, especially, to spam the others with links and play with their page rank, CommentLuv for example is one of the comments system used by lots of spammers than any other system.
That’s simply because many, if not the majority of people wants to get links and make a short comment with that famous “thanks for posting” spam phrase.
I’m not saying that all the CommentLuv lovers are spammers, but, when we see thousands of spam comments, we should think again about that system.
Spend time verifying the comments
To be clean and clear is better than accepting spam comments just to show that you have readers.
Even, if you have the Akismet plugin and other tools to stop spam comments, you won’t stop them at 100% spammers are not only want to get links. But, they also want to send you spam offers, they can do anything to show you a real comment. So, make sure to know the spam comments from the others.
A real person who wants to comment and add value or ask a question, or whatever else should stay in the post topic. At the same time, he should use a real name and not a website URL, this is a real spam way and you should spend the necessary time and approve comments.
If you don’t care about your blog, no one else will do. You’re the only one who can filter which comments are real.
Another great way to avoid spam is to limit the number of URLs in a single comment.
The “settings” menu in your WordPress dashboard is what you need, under “discussions” select what you need, and save the changes, in the Discuss plugin, you can also set some options and avoid spam comments.
Conclusion
Comments are what makes WordPress and blogging, in general, a great source of information and discussions.
The blog post can get real value from comments, a new added idea is what people want and this will make the reader engaged and want to participate. But, you should remember that not all the comment systems are the same.
You should think about the social network users and let them comment in an easy way, but you should also protect your blog from spammers, and only use the popular commenting system and not those used by spam sites just to build their spam links.
