I have been using the commenting system called LiveFyre for a little while now. I like the networking features but it seems that a great many people are having issues with it.
My goal is to create and foster conversation and dialog. That can’t be done if the commenting tool is user friendly.
I personally feel that IntenseDebate is the best option as it’s made by wordpress and works very, very well.
I value your opinion and so I’m asking you to vote for your prefered commenting software. 🙂
[polldaddy poll=6643074]
Please also turn on comment moderation, then implement a form of CAPTCHA to filter out spammers, to keep the posts on topic, that would be two great features for any commenting tool to use in the background which figures into that of the UX for users.
First and foremost, you need to look at your demographics information / data that you have or could gather, not just peoples' votes on a subject matter. By mulling over that data and do some mining of it you can get a better picture, simply because user interface and experience (collectively known as GUI and UX together) make up for 90% of peoples' decision to vote. If you could tell what it is that is bugging them or that they love about each commenting tool, that would help you along in your decision to go forward.
You might even come up with your own tool by scripting your own stuff which could address all the weaknesses of the previous commenting tools people didn't like but you like for what ever feature that worked for you and make the GUI and UX to reflect what the users want, in other words two different GUIs but has one unified database to drive the comments and site forward.
I will say this, for absolute beginners to intermediate level expertise, the WordPress plug-ins for websites is more than adequate, I also like Disqus, there are more complicated ones that I like because of all the options I have, although that's not for everyone. I think the best way to do this is to have it stay as simple as possible if people are posting from the web without logging in and if they log into your site to post, the user preferences can then load the commenting tool / editor that they prefer to use.
How does that sound, Rob? Sound like a plan?
Thanks. I appreciate that. IntenseDebate seems to be the best overall. I liked LiveFyre's realtime networking but to many people say they can't use it for some reason. My wife is having the same issue on her blog as well and switched back to IntenseDebate.
I don't know what the issue with LiveFyre is but I know that many were unhappy with it.