What's a good replacement for Disqus? [closed]

Question

Disqus used to have several options: oldest first, "best" (most upvoted) first, newest first. Threaded or unthreaded (or allow replies, but show posts in order anyway). Different options suit different communities. In places where everyone is replying individually to the opening article, and there's little interaction between commenters, best or newest ordering probably works well, and threaded comments can take care of what little interaction between commenters does exist. However, in communities where there is long discussion, and much interaction between commenters, and proper conversation, sorting by oldest first without threading works best. Also, people with certain information processing disorders find threaded comments completely unreadable anyway.

Disqus has suddenly, overnight, and without warning, changed its policies. And removed most of the previous options. Now all comments everywhere are threaded, and the default sorting is best first. Some communities of which I am a member will now need to move away from Disqus to something less terrible. What are the alternatives?

Answer 1

Last time I've checked, IntenseDebate was a valid, feature rich alternative to Disqus (with no controversy attached).

Answer 2

I'm allowed to plug my own company, right?

Realtidbits was created with publishers in mind. Our mantra, if you can call it that, is to design the best possible product for publishers. Our motto, "We're building for 2 Million visitors, not 2 million bloggers." From day one we have built with high traffic web sites in mind. So, while we may have the features above that you mention, it should also be noted that Disqus is a "Free" solution for many. I say "Free" of course knowing that it comes with a price. Disqus is no different than Facebook in that they are using your data as both a commenter and publisher and their new policies reflect that. Realtidbits put ownership of the data in the hands of publishers and the user's connection is to that publisher alone. Unlike Disqus, Livefyre or Facebook Comments, if a user makes a comment in Realtidbits it does not travel across the web with him/her to the next destination. Realtidbits reduces the ick-factor of social media: we don't own your data, you do.

Featurewise, there's little delta between Disqus, Livefyre, and Realtidbits. We share many of the features that are commonly needed/requested by users, community managers and publishers. However, Realtidbits is designed to be hacked. You will never see our logo on the product. It can be styled 100% with CSS to look like your brand. It is not just embeddable but also hackable. You can turn on and off features by marking them true or false in the params section of the embed code. You can also create your own functionality by writing plugins that enhance our comments beyond their original use. We've partnered with best of breed tech vendors to enable Video commenting, for example, which uses our plugin architecture to make such enhancements possible. Image uploading, social sign-on, embedded intents, email notifications: they're all enhancements contributed by third-parties and/or customers who've taken to hacking a solution into our product.

Last, while Comments are what publishers commonly seek, we also have architected comments streams to take on whole new visualizations such as Facebook style image galleries, pinterest style pinboard and realtime forums. It's pretty powerful stuff which are nicely described in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXoRStAdHiI

Have a look at our Site to kick the tires and read our Documentation (in the Support section of our Web site) to learn more about our technology.