Yesterday, Network World rolled out a new commenting platform, Disqus. This marks a big change for us, but change is good!
You’ll notice a new comment platform live on Network World. This is a big change for us as we had previously not required registration for comments. Editors here debated long and hard over this issue for many months (maybe even years). We want to encourage lively discussion and debate among our readers, bloggers, editors and to make it as easy as possible for you to share your thoughts. However, spammers loved us for our openness and it became an increasing burden to keep our sites free of that stuff. Required registration has long since become an industry norm among most publications for that very reason.
We sought out a platform that offered the smallest barrier with registration while still offering us great features. Disqus requires only an e-mail address, a user name of your choosing and a password. And for most users, it won’t even require that because it also accepts the logins from your Web services/social networking sites (Google, Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook) and it also accepts OpenID.
To repeat, you don’t have to register again if you would prefer to use your user/id from one of the sites Disqus accepts.
I use myVidoop as my OpenID provider, because it offers a lot of security features. If you don’t have an OpenID yet, check out myVidoop.
But the big question is: what’s in it for you? Once logged in, you are ready to comment on any site that uses Disqus. This includes Network Word’s sister sites, Computerworld, Infoworld, CIO, CSO, and hundreds of other sites around the Web. In addition, Disqus gives us some cool new features. For instance, each of IDG’s sister sites is part of a syndication agreement. Computerworld can publish news stories produced by Network World and vice versa. With Disqus when you comment on a story that appears on multiple sister sites, that comment stays with the story, and can be read by everyone looking at that article.
In other words, if we publish a Computerworld story, which we do often, and you put a comment on it, that comment will appear on the same story on Computerworld (through Disqus) and other IDGE sites. You can read details about the comment-sharing network here.
As Network World blogger Buzzblog writes, “The good news is that your words of wisdom will reach a wider audience and the views of that wider audience will be reflected here.”
As of now, blogs are not routinely shared between sister sites — just news stories and in-depth features — so comments and discussion you post to your favorite Network World blogger will remain only on Network World.
From our point of view, Disqus also gives the editors here better spam controls, better comment moderation tools, and the ability to standardize on policy enforcement across all of our publications.
We know it’s a pain to register again — or to login with one of your existing user/passwords from OpenID or social media sites. But the change will do us all good. Thanks for participating!
Julie Bort
Network World Online Community Editor
jbort@nww.com
