bye bye disqus hello comment luvWell after serious thought I’ve abandoned the Disqus comment system in favor of the less glamorous but far more link friendly Comment Luv plugin. I’ve been using Disqus here for the past four months and was quite happy with it overall except for one major issue. All comments are nofollow. Since blogs are developing as a massive community the majority of bloggers are looking to network with other blogs that will help them grow their reach and increase their backlinks. Comment Luv is the obvious choice for me. The vast majority of my blogging friends use Comment Luv and have encouraged me to use it.

I had a brief conversation with some of my blogging friends over at Blogger Luv and Gail Gardner from growmap.com left me a pretty helpful response, “Personally, I prefer CommentLuv but I can see some benefits to using IntenseDebate or Disqus. I do have some comparison posts you may find helpful:

Ironically, I noticed that all three of those bloggers who wrote comparisons are now using CommentLuv. That might be a good indication that there is a reason many of us prefer it over the others.”

Indeed I did find those posts helpful and would encourage anyone else considering this move or wondering what comment system to use on their blog to read them. A word of advice, spend a little time and research the varying systems and make a decision early on in the life of your blog. Readers don’t like to see blogs that change everything all the time. There are few things more annoying than a blog that is constantly changing its theme or overhauling their look. Readers get comfortable with the way things are, disrupting your commenting system by changing it up for something better could have both pros and cons. But in the long run I think this change will be beneficial.

John Sullivan the brain behind Blogger Luv told me “Having your comments on any 3rd party besides your site makes no sense. Sure some have cool little features that make it enticing to have those features added, but the LINK between YOU and YOUR Visitors and related sites is the whole name of the game and where the strength of a site comes in.”

Comment Luv also features an entire network and some pretty neat options for you as a blog owner or as a commenter. Want to promote your blog with Comment Luv? Take a look at their network to find out more, here.

UPDATE (October 31, 2010)

After some further interaction with some fantastic bloggers (see the comment thread), I thought I’d update this post and let you know the various plugins that ended up being present on this blog to affect and improve the commenting system:

Comment Luv (this is the key, adds the link friendly option to include your latest blog post in your comment)
Do Follow (Since comment luv doesn’t inherently make comments do follow, this plugin takes care of that)
TwitterLink Comments (adds option to put your twitter username into the comment)
Subscribe to Comments (a great plugin that gives commenters the option to subscribe to comments by email)

After I removed Disqus I had a short lived panic attack when I discovered that for some reason my blogs theme didn’t allow for threaded comments and replies. This was a serious but shortlived concern, when I began cleaning up some old plugins, and removed a few that were no longer in use the REPLY option magically came back, and the threads all went into place. I wasn’t expecting that to happen so I’m not sure what caused the conflict, but it is fixed now.

Tell Me What You Think

So there you have it. As you can see Disqus is out and Comment Luv is in. So what do you think, was this a good move? Are there additional tips / advice you could offer to improve the aesthetic appearance of the comment section?