How To Choose A Commenting System For A Site?

How to choose a commenting system for a site? When developing a site, depending on its type and theme, the ability to add custom comments may be included in its functionality. Many ready-made CMSs already have their own commenting systems in their toolkit, but quite often site owners also resort to installing third-party solutions. How to choose a commenting system for the site will be discussed in more detail below.

Commenting systems are used on a variety of sites, but they are most widely used, of course, on information and entertainment portals. When choosing a particular commenting system, site owners pay attention to several important factors, among which the following can be called the main ones.

Commenting System Security.

Through security holes in commenting systems, attackers can inject malicious code into the site, so site owners usually pay maximum attention to this issue. In particular, the chosen commenting system should not “skip” any executable code.

Ease of installation.

If it comes to choosing an external commenting system, then simplicity and ease of installation becomes an important factor. For example, many commenting systems offer several solutions for different platforms, so installing them on a site is straightforward.

Convenience of moderation.

Although commenting on the Internet is free, there are still a number of rules that commentators must follow. And to check comments for compliance with these rules, usually, in the commenting system, you need a moderation functionality. Moderation can be either manual or semi- or fully automatic.

User authorization convenience.

If users have to go through some complicated registration or authorization procedures in order to leave their comments, this will significantly cool their “fervor”. Therefore, the balance between the convenience of authorization and the need to obtain data about commentators is important.

Audience engagement.

In order for the comment thread to be actively replenished with fresh messages, it is important that commentators receive notification of updates in discussions. Typically, third-party services have the necessary functionality for this, allowing commentators to quickly receive information about the development of the discussion.

Comment storage.

Although text comments do not take up much disk space, with a sufficiently large number of them, the question of storing comments becomes relevant. If you use an external commenting system, you can expect that comments will be stored on its servers. True, there is one “but”: if a failure occurs, the site owner will not be able to influence the situation.

Additional options.

Often, site visitors want to not only leave a text message in the comments but also add an image, an animated video or video suitable in their opinion. Also, visitors usually want to rate comments from other authors. Therefore, when choosing a commenting system, the presence of such additional options site owners try to take into account.

Choosing a commenting system for a site, taking into account the above factors, is often quite difficult. It sometimes happens that the capabilities built into the content management system are not enough to meet the needs of users and the administration, and sometimes you have to pay extra for the flexible functionality of external commenting systems. An alternative to both solutions can be the use of commenting forms from popular social networks, but there may also be some “pitfalls”, because, for example, not in all discussions, commentators would like to indicate their real data from social networks.