My blog website is based on WordPress and the commenting is currently powered by Disqus platform.
I do plan to start a community based on Discourse and I am wondering if it is possible to change the commenting in such a way that only registered community members are able to comment on a story and what would that entail?
Essentially, in order to comment under a blog post, people would require a registered account with Discourse forum installation.
Thanks for any feedback or ideas I can get.
Why not ditch Disqus and go Discourse-only for your comments using the WordPress integration?
For an example see our blog: Who is Discobot? and scroll down to see the comments.
Thank you, Michael, appreciate your response and that is exactly the intent! I want to build my own audience around the blog, merging the ability to use the forum and also reply to blog posts using the already registered forum account. Does Discourse offer this kind of functionality/flexibility? I took a look at Discobot, I am not sure I understand its scope. Is there an available WordPress integration-specific addon/mod for that that I can look at?
There is. Check it out at GitHub - discourse/wp-discourse: WordPress plugin that lets you use Discourse as the community engine for a WordPress blog. We also have the #support:wordpress category for support - and I see @simon just moved your topic to it.
I wasn’t trying to show you Discobot but our blog setup, that was just an example of the integration.
Scroll down on that page and you’ll see how it looks with the combination of WP, Discourse and the plugin as @jomaxro points out.
We recommend signing up for a free trial if you haven’t already and then you can experiment with the look & feel and integration.
Thank you, Joshua, that’s exactly what I was looking for! I see there are a few ways to integrate it. I think I like the way Discourse does it on its blog the most with “notable replies” being present under the post and the rest in a forum discussion format. Are “notable replies” algorithm-based (as in only those with most likes, etc get selected) or are they editor-picked?
Do you think there is a way to natively make all replies appear under a WordPress blog (including a comment box window) (with some custom coding if need be)? Just want to know if that is an option for us.
Per https://github.com/discourse/wp-discourse/wiki/Setup#comment-settings, it is algorithm based.
I would assume that if settings are adjusted you could make all comments appear, but I’m not certain.
This is not possible natively.
If you use the WP Discourse plugin’s default settings it will give you the first 5 replies in sequential order. The plugin should probably have an explicit setting for this. The limit on the number of replies is set by the Max Visible Comments setting. You can set the Max Visible Comments to a very large number. It’s possible to write some custom code to paginate the comments - I did that a while ago. I have it somewhere on GitHub and can look for it if you’re interested. I think a better approach for when sequential replies are being used would be to display the first batch of replies and then have a Load More Comments button. Clicking that button would pull more comments from Discourse and load them on the page.
Adding a comment box window isn’t difficult. The post’s Discourse topic id is added as post metadata with the key discourse_topic_id. You can create a post for the topic through the Discourse API. The reason for not including this in the plugin is that we’re trying to move the commenting to Discourse as a way of improving conversation. There may be legitimate use cases for allowing people to post comments directly on WordPress.
Firstly, thanks for the brilliant commentary. Extremely useful and thanks for your time. I do agree that “Load More Comments” button would probably more user friendly than just pre-loading 15-20 comments. I do like very much how Disqus actually ranks the comments “newest first”, “most liked”, etc. While I presume it is possible to custom code any part of it, I am starting to see the purpose behind moving the conversation to Discourse as well, it gives a lot more flexibility and freedom.
The news blog I am working on is popular, so in light of launching our own forum around the subject, I wanted to start building my own community instead of handing off userbase to Disqus. That’s where the idea, inspired by how The Verge handles it, came to me. Getting people to register once for a social account (Discourse) and use that to comment under stories. The legitimate reason to have blog posts having its own separate conversation is that a healthy percentage of people prefer to just comment on the news and not get involved in the whole conversation. However, this is something that I am still considering. Just investigating the technical options that a platform like Discourse provides at this stage.