When we interviewed Daniel Ha, CEO and co-founder of Disqus, earlier this year, he explained why some users were reporting problems syncing comments between Disqus and WordPress and that improvements would be coming soon. “We may have taken some services offline to work on them which may have affected those who were (more…)
In this episode, Marcus Couch and I are joined by Daniel Ha, CEO and co-founder of Disqus. Ha explains why he created the service, what his thoughts are on large sites disabling comments, and the state of comments on the web. We also discuss the company’s monetization strategies and what (more…)
NRKbeta, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation’s media and technology site, is experimenting with a new way of keeping comments on topic. A new plugin on the WordPress-powered site aims to ensure commenters have read the article by requiring them to complete a short, three-question quiz before opening the comment form. Visitors (more…)
Online harassment is a hot topic right now, as Twitter’s perennial battle with trolls heats up, forcing the company to develop new features to combat abuse. Technology companies are scrambling to create solutions that will make their communities safer for users and now Google is taking on the challenge of (more…)
When Disqus announced it would be releasing new, subscription-based versions later this year, users didn’t expect to have the new advertising model injected into their sites without notice. Disqus CEO Daniel Ha said the company would release finalized pricing and provide more details well in advance of its planned March (more…)
One of my favorite features in WordPress is the ability to easily embed content from services such as YouTube by copying and pasting the source URL into the post editor. The feature is called oEmbed and was added seven years ago to WordPress 2.9. While content authors enjoy the luxury (more…)
Building on the momentum generated from the WordPress 4.4 development cycle, WordPress 4.5 includes a number of enhancements to comments. In a post on the Make Core blog, Rachel Baker explains the changes and what to expect. “WordPress 4.5 includes several ancient bug fixes and a few enhancements in the (more…)
There’s a lot of great WordPress content published in the community but not all of it is featured on the Tavern. This post is part of a new series where I share an assortment of items related to WordPress that caught my eye but didn’t make it into a full (more…)
Between posts and comments, WordPress.com is an enormous hub of activity. The service recently published its 2015 year in review and the numbers are staggering. Last year, users published 660M posts that generated more than 655M comments. The review looks back at posts that went viral, books published by (more…)
When I founded WP Tavern in 2009, comments were an important part of the site’s initial success. After six years, the site has published its 30,000th comment. At a time where large websites such as Copyblogger and the Toronto Star are closing down comments in favor of social media, the (more…)
In this episode of WordPress Weekly, Marcus Couch and I are joined by Drew Jaynes, WordPress core contributor. We discuss a wide range of topics, from Jaynes’ opinions on Scott Taylor’s work on WordPress 4.4 thus far to his trip to WordCamp Capetown Africa, 2015. We go in-depth on 10up’s (more…)
Last week, I shared the lessons I learned and the drawbacks to moderating comments in WordPress. In this post, I highlight six plugins that solve a problem I encountered or enhance comments for both readers and site administrators. All of the plugins are free of charge and available from the (more…)