As part of the blog’s redesign, I switched the comment system from WordPress to Livefyre. Now that the real-time comment system has been running on the blog for a few weeks, I can recommend it without hesitation.
Livefyre is a real-time comment solution for bloggers looking to centralize conversations from around the social web back to their content, while encouraging live engagement between users on the site. Some key features of Livefyre include:
- Social Sync: pulling Facebook & Twitter comments into your content in real-time.
- Tagging Friends from Facebook & Twitter: anyone leaving a comment brings their entire social network with them to the conversation.
- Intelligent & Community Moderation: ability to moderate in real-time thereby increasing the quality of the conversations without affecting the quantity.
- SEO credit: Livefyre is Google crawl-able so you receive SEO credit for all comments, including those originating from Facebook & Twitter.
- Real-time technology: built on XMPP chat technology for the fastest, lightest weight conversations possible.
As nice as real-time comments are, the best feature of Livefyre is it’s virtually spam proof. Before switching to Livefyre, I was coming up on 1 million spam. Now I doubt I will ever reach that figure. Because Livefyre replaces your WordPress comment system, it’s immuned to the common spam attacks that hit every WordPress blog running the WordPress comment system.
Why Livefyre And Not Disqus?
Many readers have asked me why I went with Livefyre and not Disqus? The first reason is I was never able to get Disqus to work on my blog. I’m sure with some digging, we could have got Disqus to work. However, Disqus is kind of a one-way street. Once you’re on it, you’re pretty much stuck with it. Comments are saved to the Disqus servers. Should you remove Disqus, you’ll lose all the Disqus comments and are left with the old WordPress comments from the pre-Disqus days. I’m sure there’s a way to import all the Disqus comments back into WordPress, but I’m also sure it’s not something that Disque would make easy to do.
Like Disqus, Livefrye saves comments on their servers. Unlike Disqus, a copy of the comment is also saved to your WordPress comment database. This makes it extremely easy to switch back to the WordPress comment system should you decided to remove Livefrye. However, once you start using Livefrye, you’ll never want to switch back to plain old WordPress comments.
