When we moved the blog into its own domain we faced a few technical issues that I had hoped that I could solve without changing comment systems - but alas it wasn't to be. So I have just rolled out a new comment system - well new to the blog anyway.
The Disqus commenting system offers a lot more functionality than is provided in the core K2 commenting system but there is one major drawback for us - and that is that we have lost all of the existing comments. We still have them in the database but its not possible (as far as I know) to port the K2 comments across to Disqus so given some of the usability issues we were seeing I think this is a necessary sacrifice for the life of the blog.
### We moved the blog to a new Joomla installation.
One of the biggest issues we had was that in order to retain the previous comments for the blog, we also needed to move move the userbase across to this installation as well. This effectively drew a line in the sand, so that any user that had existed in the Joomlabamboo database at the time of moving the site was also in the blog's database. This meant that users had to log in before they could comment which is fine although a little confusing if you were already logged in on the main site.
To compound this issue if you signed up to Joomlabamboo after the blog had moved there was no record of you in the blog's database, so new users needed to register on the blogs site to comment which meant that they effectively had two profiles at Joomlabamboo - one for the Joomla template downloads and the other for the blog ... confusing to say the least.
### There is an up side.
So taking into account the loss of the comments I think the benefits of using Disqus are many and varied:
- Login via your social network - twitter, google, facebook or via your disqus profile.
- Show reactions from people tweeting about the blog post. Most commentators today [recognise that twitter is becoming (or has become) one of the major mediums for discussing blog posts](http://dannybrown.me/2009/08/25/is-twitter-killing-blog-comments/).
- Ye olde trackbacks - what is a blog without a trackback url.
- Threaded comments
- Better notification of comments.
### Implementating Disqus with K2
Ive opted for the path of manual implementation which gives me more control over the output - specifically where the comment anchor gets placed. For the faint hearted the good folk over at [Joomlaworks do have a plugin for K2 and disqus](http://www.joomlaworks.gr/content/view/99/34/). The only issue I see at the moment is that the comment count seems to cache pretty hard so ill keep working on improving that - or at least finding a solution for it.
I'd love to know what you think. There are a lot of comment systems out there - which system do you use?
