2013 must be the year of third-party commenting systems. Facebook’s comments were already popular and integrated into several sites. This year I’ve seen Disqus take over the comment sections of some websites, apparently increasing their lead over Livefyre, while Google is already deploying their Google+ comment integration in Blogspot.
These solutions might be interesting for the business owner / novice webmaster who wants to save some time on implementing comments on a plain, non-CMS site. On the other hand, I don’t really understand why many CMS-based sites are dropping their native CMS option in favor of a solution with so many drawbacks. This is what’s happening…
- Third-party commenting systems own the comments. They feed them to the webpages through scripts that don’t actually make the comments part of the source code or (in other words) visible to search engines. It gets worse with Google+ where many comments are actually not comments, but Google+ shares of the webpage. Sometimes you can’t even follow a proper line of discussion in the original site.
- External systems can fail independently of your site being up and running. I’ve personally experienced a case where externally hosted comments just wouldn’t load. It also happened that I lost my comment for failing to realise that I needed to log in.
- 3rd party comment systems track comments of a user across all the sites using the same system. Just the kind of centralization that your favorite government intelligence loves.
- These systems also force the user to either create another account (adding complexity to the user’s own account/password management process) or to give them access to some of your social profile data.
- They can simply not work on mobile devices. With smartphone and table use on the rise, you’re losing valuable interactions with your site.
I wonder if there’s any study out there that measured user engagement before and after the switch from native to third-party comment systems… So far I only found similar opinions. [1,2,3]