Comments have same importance and a part of a blog as the article itself. The comment section engages readers and allows them to interact with other people who have similar interests. Users can ask questions, create discussion, and even make jokes or share images depending on how powerful the comment system is.
You’ll even find some systems that provide social sharing tools or integrated communities so that you can reach more visitors. Its a complete Growth Hack. It all depends on what type of interface you’d like and which of the best comment systems you decide on.
The Main Reasons Why Comments are Great
1. Interaction
Are you blogging for yourself or for an audience? Having an open comments section allows you to interact much easier with your audience, which in turn makes them an integral part of your blog’s puzzle.
In many cases, the discussions that ensue in the comments section – whether between you and your readers, or several of your readers going back and forth — can often be just as meaningful or even more so, as the content itself, raising important questions and adding details that aid your audience’s understanding of the topic.
2. Feedback
Along with the discussions, the comments section also gives your audience an easy way to provide you with feedback. Do they like what you’re currently doing? Could you be doing more of something else?
Let them guide you — they’ll tell you exactly what they like and don’t like, and you can then make the necessary improvements to your blog. It’s pretty much like getting a blog consultation for free.
3. Content Ideas
A quick scan through the comments relating to any given post will provide you with plenty of ideas for follow up content. Are there certain aspects of your posts your users don’t fully understand? Are there bits that they’d like to hear more about? Expand on those topics in a blog post.
What’s more, a few users (I’ve done it before in my comments) will go out on a tangent and tell you **outright **that they would like to learn more about xyz topic, and that you should do a blog post on it. Neat, huh? If you struggle to regularly come up with fresh content ideas, your comments section could be a Godsend.
**4. SEO **– Did you know that the comments your users leave will aid your SEO performance? The free user-generated content fills out your page and will be fully acknowledged when search engines crawl your site. In fact, if your commentators frequently mention keywords that you’re trying to rank your blog post for, your post will start ranking higher for the keyword (in most scenarios).
Be careful with this though. We highly recommend manually moderating all comments to ensure only high-quality content is added to your site. Otherwise, it could have the opposite effect.
Secondly, tons of comments helps Google to know that people are engaged with your blog and enjoy interacting with it. Consequently, they’ll look at your blog with good favor and rank you better.
5. Community – When you have an open comments section, you’ll probably see the same people commenting again and again. When you interact with these people, you’ll begin to build your own community around your blog, which encourages loyalty.
On the other hand, WordPress comment systems come along with some downsides. That’s why many publications either don’t have comments at all or decide to get rid of them after awhile. For instance, NPR eventually blocked its commenting system because it felt that the news is more about the article. And, the comment thread tended to spiral into negativity.
What is the problem with most of the options available?
1. Spam
The moment you open up your comments section you **will **be inundated with all kinds of ridiculous pingbacks, trackbacks, and bot-generated comments, even if you think that you don’t have much of an audience. The fact of the matter is that you **do **have an audience … it’s just that most of them are bots.
Nothing is more annoying than spam comments. They are the blogger’s scourge of the Internet and each one will take away precious minutes from your day.
2. Moderation
You can install all the spam blockers in the world, but spam messages will still slip through the cracks here and there. Moderation can be a huge drain on time.
Even when you’re dealing with a relatively small amount of comments, the time it takes to read each one can really start to stack up. Could you be doing better things with your time?
3. Negativity
To be a blogger, you need thick skin. It’s a fact of life. You can’t please everyone, and, with the Internet providing a cloak of anonymity, there are bound to be trolls you’ll encounter. Having a different opinion is perfectly fine and should be encouraged, but some people take pleasure in saying malicious things.
What are the community requirements?
When looking for an alternative to Disqus or WordPress comments, we found some requirements commonly searched by the community.
The requirements I had where as follows:
- Be privacy respecting
- Be easy to moderate comments
- Allow anonymous commenting
- Not add loads of JavaScript to my site
- Fit in with the my site’s theme
By keeping all above requirements in mind, we have found out our product Socia9 Comments.
What is Comments?
Social9 Comments is an customized implementation of Commento that allows you to foster discussion on your website – if you have a blog, you can embed this if you want your readers to add comments. It's fast and bloat-free, has a modern interface, and is reasonably secure. Unlike most alternatives, Social9 Comments is lightweight and privacy-focused; I'll never sell your data, show ads, embed third-party tracking scripts, or inject affiliate links. Below are some of the features that will make you go for Social9 Comments.
Privacy Respecting
We, Social9 team make it abundantly clear that privacy is a first class citizen when it comes to their service. Comments is also free from third-party tracking and advertisers. This alone was a major selling point for me.
Unlimited Free Cloud Version
We don't charge anything for comments, You can use our cloud version which is fast and secure. Al other providers have pricing for cloud versions because there is infrastructure cost involved when hosting services on cloud. We are hosting everything in AWS cloud. Comments is free because our aim is to provide a whole social solution not only Comments.
Allow Anonymous Commenting
Allowing your visitors to quickly and easily add an anonymous comment is incredibly important because we all respect users privacy. Adding an anonymous comment is as simple as clicking a checkbox, then adding your comment. You don’t have to add any personal information, not even a name.
If you want to receive an email notification if you get a reply, you can also sign in with your Google, GitHub, or Social9 accounts.
Social9 Comments
Not Add Loads Of JavaScript
The JavaScript for Social9 Comments is just 14 KB in size. Even on a dial-up connection that’s a negligible amount of additional data. On a modern broadband connection, it’s a fraction of a millisecond in additional load time.
Look & Feel
When visiting a website, You will find it really jarring if the comment section doesn’t fit in with the aesthetics of the rest of the site. By default, Comments looks pretty good, but you can look it exactly like the rest of my site.
Easy Installation
Use the universal HTML snippet to embed Comments. You can do this by pasting the following HTML snippet after each blog post, for example.
<div id="s9comments"></div>
<script defer
src="https://social9.com/comments/js/commento.js">
</script>And that's it! You now have Comments on your website with automatic spam detection, fast servers and CDNs, OAuth providers, and much more built-in!
If you have any questions about any of these comments systems, let us know in our comments section below!
What is Social9?
Welcome! 👋 is a one-stop-shop platform to drive more traffic and increase audience engagement by leveraging the power of social media.
It offers seamless website integrations with the latest technologies, out of the box analytics and many other **"FREE"** features for you to get started!
Lets get started! - https://social9.com/
