Commenting is very important for a blog it allows your audience to engage with you and your content. One other advantage is sometime other people can help you improve your content by spotting mistakes or giving you enhancements. I would always want comment system on my blogs.
16- Types of Blogging Systems Research
There are basically 2 types of commenting systems, Local and Remote which i will now go into more depth below:
Local
This is where the software and the comments are made, stored and maintained on your website. Some blogging systems come with commenting inbuilt and these enough for most people. Then there are the more complex commenting systems you can use to upgrade or replace default one or just install because you don't have one. Some of these systems can have some online services for auto moderating comments integrated to reduce spam, remove bad words and other such things but they do not store any data in the cloud but just the processing power of these services and then store the comments locally on your server after processing.
| Pros |
Cons |
- you control the comments
- You own the comments
- You can edit them as needed
- You can control the users
- You can use 1 login for the/your website (i.e. other services such as project fork)
- You can collect email address and sign them up to newsletters
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- No 3rd party revenue stream
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Remote
This is a new and growing trend in the social internet. I will just list the main pros and cons of using one of these services:
| Pros |
Cons |
- Free
- Cross Platform
- Have their own control panel
- Automatic moderation system in place
- Antispam built in
- Can control multiple websites from 1 control panel
- Can moderate lots of your websites from 1 control panel
- Customers can use one login across multiple websites
- Decreases server load by remote server handling your comments
- Can earn money from advertising
|
- Requires specific plugins/support
- Can cause slow pages loads (i.e. the comments don’t load instantly)
- Ajaxed based, might have issues with Google not seing the comments
- Dependant on a 3rd party system
- Dependant on URL as Identifier
- Comments are not stored on your website
- Does not store the comments in the pages HTML
- Asynchronous loading from server
- I suspect that the comments are URL based so if you changed any links on your site the comments might move
- You have to login to the service's server to manage your comments
- Stored on remote server so if they go down so do all of your comments
- You might have to pay an ongoing and ever larger subscription to keep the system operating or loose all of your comments.
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17 - Commenting Systems for Joomla Research
Apart form Disqus all of these commenting systems are for Joomla only.
K2 (inbuilt)
K2 has its own internal commenting system
| Pros |
Cons |
- Free
- Connects to the article not the URL
- Well supported on forums
- Updated regularly
|
- Limited to K2 Articles
- No automatic moderation
- Comments are siloed into K2
|
Easyblog (Internal)
Easyblog comes with its own in-built commenting system. It is similiar to Komento but i dont think it has all of the same functionality.
| Pros |
Cons |
- Free (by proxy)
- Has API links to automatic moderating services
- Has quite a few options
- Ideal if you only need comments on the blog
- A lot of options
- Comments are made in schema format (option)
|
- Only does comments for Easyblog items
- Comments are siloed into Easyblog
|
Komento
This is a paid for extension from Stackideas, the makers of Easyblog and is constantly maintained.
| Pros |
Cons |
- Supports EasyBlog
- Updated often
- Excellent support
- Akismet integration (antispam service)
- Seems to have all the Easyblog features inbuilt
- Large number of extensions supported from the 1 component
- Can be controlled from your website admin area
- Kommento can be enabled/disabled per component
- Centrally control comments from multiple systems
- Easy to integrate other Joomla extensions to use Komento
- Extra modules and plugins
|
- Commercial
- End User documentation does not exist.
|
JComments
This is the orginal commenting system for Joomla and is free. It does not seem to be actively maintained anymore but still works.
| Pros |
Cons |
- Free
- Extensively support
- Popular
- Good reviews
- Large number of extensions supported
- Can embed videos in comments
- BBcode support
- Can be reskinned very easy
- lot of Joomla modules
- Can control comments from multiple systems
|
- Not updated that often
- Only 1 programmer maintains this
- You have to use a tag each page you want comments on in easy blog. For Joomla articles you can set this on by default I think
- No antispam features except for a banned word list
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Disqus
This is a cloud based commenting system that is free to use and offers the possibility of advertising revenue. However on large traffic sites you do have topay to use the service. End users never have to pay it is just for the website owners taht the costs can creep in. You need to take this into account if your website is going to scale up. For small websites using this service is an option.
| Pros |
Cons |
- Free
- Cross Platform
- Have their own control panel
- Automatic moderation system in place
- Works fine for article and K2
- You can sync the comments locally (not tested)
- Antispam built in
- Can control multiple websites from 1 control panel
- Can moderate all of your websites from 1 control panel
- Possibility of using API to store local cached copies of your comments
- Customers can use their 1 disqus login across multiple websites and if they have one already are more likely to social engage?
- Can use disqus as a social tool like twitter or Facebook
- Decreases server load by having disquss server your comments
- Can earn money from disqus
- Can change URLs via a csv for disquss etc... so no longer tied in to one URL
- Can control comments from multiple systems and sites
- Works cross platform i.e. Wordpress, Joomla and many other CMS and website software.
- Customers can use their 1 disqus login across multiple websites and if they have one already are more likely to social engage?
- Can change URLs via a csv for discuss etc... so no longer tied in to one URL (not tested)
|
- Requires specific plugins/support for each component
- Can cause slow pages loads (i.e. the comments don’t load instantly)
- Ajaxed based, might have issues with google
- Dependant on a 3rd party system
- Dependant on URL as Identifier
- Comments are not on your website
- Might have issues with specific Joomla extensions
- Does not store the comments in the pages HTML
- Asynchronous loading from server
- I suspect that the comments are URL based so if you changed any links on your site the comments might move
- You have to login to their server to manage your comments
- Stored on remote server so if they go down so do all of your comments
- Cannot join the paid program until you meet minimum requirements i.e. traffic + comments
- Cannot be disabled per Joomla component (unless you use module permissions)
- Might have issues with specific Joomla extensions
- You do not own the comments
- If disqus servers fail your comments dissapear
- You can not move comments from article to article
- You might have to pay an ongoing and ever larger subscription to keep the system operating or loose all of your comments.
- Disqus has a tiered payment model for supplying the service.
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Step 18 - Choose a Commenting System
After reading all of this information, answers to the following questions will allow you to choose the commenting system you want to use:
Do I want local or remote comments?
Followed by:
Which blogging system am I going to use?
