We’ve recently moved our blog to http://blog.disqus.com. We’re currently in the process of transitioning all the posts from here over to the new site.

Cheers,

-Giannii

Disqus Profile is not another social media account. Rather it’s the universal management tool for commenters and the most efficient way to integrate all your different online identities.

Under Connections you can pre-authenticate your Twitter, Facebook, or Open ID and reblog your comments across multiple services such as Tumblr, WordPress, Movable Type, and Typepad.

If you’ve commented before using Twitter, Facebook, or OpenID without a Disqus account, now all your comments will be automatically merged once connected.

Also add your Twitter and Facebook Avatars to your profile.

Cheers,

Giannii
DISQUS
Community Manager
help@disqus.com
@Disqus

Within our new Moderation Panel we’re made several enhancements for ease of use and to moderate without having to visit several pages. Below is a brief walkthrough of a few methods you can use to help manage your sites.

Sorting & filtering your comments can help you keep track of your conversations on a global scale. Using the filter by status option located on the right side of the panel, you can easily jump through each category.

These options are most frequently used to moderate your comments with batch actions. You can easily expand any comment by simply clicking the title or by using the expand/collapse all options at the top of the dashboard.

When performing batch actions you’ll have three options available to you; Approve, Mark Spam, & Delete. Remember to Mark Spam as spam instead of using Delete, if you just delete a comment our spam filters will not be notified.

Searching comments for common words used by trolls/spammers to moderate all their comments in one go. You can find the search box right above the filtering options.

If a spammer is persistent and continues to plague your site even though you’ve clicked mark spam. The quickest way to resolve this problem is to blacklist his username, email, & ip address. You can do this by clicking the face of their avatar.

If you happen to come across a set of comments from a known/trusted commenter, you can also whitelist their profile so you won’t have to worry about approving their comments again. Be sure to do this only for trusted commenters.

Replying to comments inline within the new moderation panel is fast & simple. You’ll never lose your place whilst moderating multiple comments. Editing undesirable content is the same process except you choose edit button instead.

Closing threads is simple, on the right side of the panel above search click view threads. You can choose to close & delete threads from that page.

If you have any questions be sure to check out the frequently asked questions section before emailing help.

Cheers,

Version 3 is our biggest release since Disqus launched. In many ways, we went back to the drawing board for this version. Many of these changes and additions comes from the culmination of everything we’ve learned about how people use Disqus and approach comments on the web.

We’ve always had two distinct sets of users: publishers who use the comment system on their sites, and the people who use their Disqus profile to comment. For quite a while, we’ve had to speak to two different audiences when building this service. Essentially, we were offering two related, but still different, services.

With this release, we’re relaunching as two different services: Disqus Comments and Disqus Profile. Disqus Comments is what you already know us for: a fully featured comment system and community tool. The reality is that there are many logins you can use when you comment (Facebook, Twitter) and Disqus Comments is agnostic to the login type. Disqus Profile, the other service, is not another profile but rather a comment manager for commenters. It’s a way to manage all the different identities you use and the comments attached to those.

Disqus’ new look and interface was a deliberate way for us to become more accessible for a wider range of publishers and commenters. Thanks to David Cole for his great work.

So what’s new besides the branding and aesthetics? Plenty. We’ll be doing a series of posts introducing new features starting this week. In this post, I’ll point out some larger changes that you can check out today:

Comment System

You’re likely most interested in what’s new with the actual comment system. We’ve released a new default theme, which better adapts to sites and is designed to provide a smoother user experience.

What sets Disqus Comments apart from other systems is its flexibility and comprehensiveness in features. We’re proud to be offering a full engine for handling discussion with deep tools, rather than just a novelty social widget.

The brand new Disqus Profile is being refocused as a tool to help commenters take back control of their comments.

Where are you from?

I was born in Encarnación and I grew up there. Encarnacion is a city bordering Argentina; it is united with the San Roque Gonzalez of Santa Cruz Bridge

What did you dream of becoming as a kid?

I have always dreamed of becoming a fashion designer. My friends have always asked me to modify their clothes when I was in college. Since they knew my family was in fashion and design of jeans, they always confided in my criticism.

Where did you learn how to do all of this?

I’ve learned a majority of things from my family, specifically my mother and I also study garment design in my country. My goal is to have the title of garment designer and to  launch my own brand of clothes entitled GiannyL. I will start with my own line of jeans.

Where did you get the idea for your site?

In 2008, my friends told me about so many people making instructional videos on YouTube and all around the web. They know how I much I love to make my own clothing so I made a video of making a dress using an old T-shirt. I couldn’t believe the amount of views and responses. I love to play with my Mac so I decided to make a website with all DIY videos to show my work.

When are you launching your fashion brand?

I’m continually working and hoping by December if everything goes well. I want to sell via online but I am painfully organizing the payment system. Paraguay is not in the list of countries that can use Paypal so I am looking at an alliance with an enterprise so that I may do it. But I have already registered my brand and I am finishing 3 designs of embroidered jeans.

Do you specialize in Men’s or Woman’s wear?

The first designs will be for women, but I won’t leave out designing for men; I like both. =)

Where did you first hear about Disqus?

My favorite social news site is Mashable uses it and after seeing it there I installed it on my site, I enjoy using Disqus.

What’s your favorite Disqus feature?

Being able to use Twitter and Facebook credentials to login and the ease of interacting with others who comment.

What would you like to see Disqus develop next?

The possibility of having two Disqus accounts on my site, one in Spanish and the other English and that they

What do your parents think about your website?

They are very proud of me.

Where did the name Giannyl come from?

My full name is Giannina Lezcano and my friends call me Gianny, so I put together Gianny + L. =)

Also Giannyl likes to pull the occasional prank on friends like I do:

To learn more about Giannyl check out her website, twitter, and Disqus Profile.

As a small side note, Feature Friday will not be posted next week but returning August 28th.

Cheers,

For some people, I won’t need to point these issues out. They already know where it is and they’ve been shouting about it. I hear you.

Increase in spam

We’re seeing an increase in a couple different types of spam lately. Sometimes it’s your straightforward, anonymous spammers. We can catch that easily. Recently, Disqus users have been victims to blackhat spammers who spend some time to leave legitimate comments, only to sign off with a suspicious link hawking designer sunglasses. We’ve gone through a handful of different spam handlers. We’re not entirely happy with what we have going on right now.

And last week, our spam handling went down for a short while which created a large backlog of unprocessed spam comments. This didn’t help things at all.

But, there is a solution. We’ve been working on our own Disqus anti-spam that we will be launching soon. It’s too early to report on its total effectiveness, but tests are looking very good.

Database issues

The last two days, our main database server hasn’t been up to snuff. We’ve been doing a lot of patching and fixing along the way, but there is a more permanent solution that we’re still scrambling to finish. Disqus needs to be reliable at all times, and sudden outage spurts aren’t acceptable.

Disqus had an outage this morning that lasted over 30 minutes. Sorry about that. Here’s what happened:

Our proxy server’s network was taken down by an automated system that detected DDoS. Translation: a machine that is especially important to the service was taken offline because some software thought there was an attack on the network (distributed denial of service).

Our hosting provider let us know that this was a mistake. There was no attack and the automated software should not have taken the machine offline. After a bit of confusion, everything was properly restored.

The main lesson for us here is that, regardless of the reason, mishaps are mishaps, and an important machine shouldn’t cause an outage in the service. We understand that. This is actually happening at a time when we are making large moves around redundancy and eliminating single points of failure. This basically means that we are making sure something like this, while it could happen again, won’t impact the reliability and performance of the service.

We always update our Twitter account on the latest happenings; follow us at twitter.com/disqus

Where did you grow up?

I’m originally from Oregon, I was born in a little town south of Oregon called Corvallis.

What did you dream of becoming as a kid?

I’ve honestly dreamed of becoming a musician since I was five years old. When I was five years old I started playing drums and I’ve never really wanted to do anything but that. Much to my dad’s dismay they wanted me to play piano and even bought a piano for the house but I would just bang on it. I was kind of a one track minded kid. One day when I was ten I came home and wanted to play the piano and my dad just about shot himself in the face.

Did you actually play drums or pots and pans?

Yeah, I started with pots and pans. Both of my parents were professional musicians and there was always band gear setup in some part of our house. I think I got started on their drummers drums in our basement but eventually they got tired of buying new kitchen equipment and bought me a drum set.

What kind of instruments do your parents play?

My dad is a bass guitar, accordion, and pedal steel player, lots of blue grass instruments. My mom is an incredible singer and in her younger years she was a drummer. I think it was sort of hereditary that I became a percussionist.

What was your first real step into the music industry?

I played professionally in bands since I was about thirteen years old. So I guess on a regional level I was making money at it since I was thirteen. My dad would take me to the gigs and of course they were all twenty one and over gigs. During the breaks I would have to leave the building because it was illegal. While waiting for the breaks to be over my dad would take me outside and we would eat burgers on the his hood of his car. When I graduated from high school I went on tours with several bands playing rock shows and arenas. After that I moved to Los Angeles from Oregon for the specific purpose of getting into film. I’ve always been a huge fan of film music.

My first real job in television was being the principal composer for Monday Night Football during the 2002-2004 seasons on ABC Sports. That was a huge break because I got acquainted very quickly with how to write for television and to turn it around in days. So that was really where I really cut my teeth. I began to do more production work after that composing music for Entertainment Tonight and several other sports shows. I did a lot of stuff like that when starting out and it really helped me hone my productions skills.

What’s the most memorable score that you’ve composed?

It seems like your favorites are always the most recent, I just finished a movie score called “The Way Home” and I had a great orchestra performing the music. That was a ton of fun. I was commissioned by the Olympic Committee to create themes for the US Olympic Swim Team during Michael Phelps gold medal run. I did a number of themes for the telecast last year and those were a lot of tough nights of writing because we kept winning. It was a great honor to be able to do something for the Olympics. When I was a kid John Williams themes were off the charts.

I’m also a studio drummer playing for several artists including Tina Tuner, Chris Cornell, and Kenny Loggins. I’ve just had the opportunity to do some really fun stuff.

Where did you hear about Disqus?

We built our blog for ScoreCast and at the time we used the blogger comment system. One of our readers said “Your guys comments suck, we can’t figure out how to login etc”. We basically said “tell us what we don’t know” and someone mentioned Disqus. Our webguy Jai Meghan looked into it and Disqus was the most clearly outline format as far as people being able to find stuff and getting registered with our community. The community page is great page as we’re a community of composers, orchestrators, contractors, and musical players. That’s really what Scorecast is about building community and trying to get the community to grow smaller as it get larger if that makes any sense. Disqus has really helped us do that.

What’s Scorecast Online?

Scorecast started in 2006 with my assistant. I would receive emails from aspiring film composers asking questions “How do I make the transition into film music?” and instead of trying to email all these people back getting bogged down with that, I started doing the podcast.

Someone wrote to me from NYU considering  our podcast as recommended listening resource for students. I realized that I needed to stop goofing off and get serious. I asked my friend Lee Sanders that does all the music for the Amazing Race if he would help out and we created Scorecast Online. We call it the virtual hangout for the musical creative. Basically we have a team of twenty five musical composers that write articles daily. It’s kind of a electronic news paper by people in the industry. It’s not really a fan sites but a resource if you’re really serious about getting into the film music.

What’s your favorite Disqus feature?

I really dig the Facebook Connect as I’m a big Facebooker. I appreciate not having to have eighty diffetent screenames to gain access. Just being able to login with my Facebook account and having everything integrated is nice. I really like how clean your system is.

If you could add anything to Disqus, what would you add?

I can’t think of anything I would add to the Disqus system.

When is the last time you composed music for yourself?

Oh man, that’s a sore subject. I don’t get the chance to do that quite a bit as most of what I do is written to picture. For the first time in a very long time I was commissioned to write a symphony and it’s a charity based thing to raise some money for kids in the town where I grew up in Oregon. I’m excited about that as I’ve not written anything independent of film in eight years. This will be an interesting exercise in freedom.

To learn more about Deane visit his twitter, website or Disqus Profile.

What do you do for a living?

My twin brother and I founded Wolfire Games, an independent video game studio. We’ve been working hard for the past year along with three other guys to build Overgrowth — the ninja rabbit fighting game.

What type of audience would overgrowth appeal too?

Overgrowth is a pretty unique game. At its core, it is about free movement and fighting. You can play it carefully, sneaking around and carefully breaking people’s spines by slamming them into the ground from behind. Or you can just run into the fray and just brawl with as many guys as you can take. There are not very many controls, but you can improvise awesome moves, for example, jumping over someone’s head and kicking them into a group of enemy wolves, causing them to get knocked into sharp rocks.

I think fans of violent, action games will have a great time with Overgrowth. Squeamish people, not so much.

How long did Overgrowth take to develop compared to your other titles?

We’re approaching the one year mark of five dedicated guys working full time on it. We also have a number of amazing contributors, for instance, Ryan Gordon working on the Linux build, and Mikko Tarmia working on music for us. We’re taking it really seriously.

Lugaru, on the other hand, was built in maybe a couple summers, single-handedly by my brother during high school.

What engine does your game run on?

We are very proud that we’ve built our own engine from the ground up — we call it the Phoenix Engine. It’s a huge, huge investment of resources to do this and the vast majority of games use a pre-built game engine.

The advantage of our engine is that we can custom tailor everything for Overgrowth. Overgrowth is truly built from the ground up to be a ninja rabbit fighting game. Everything about the procedural animation system to the map editor has been tailored specifically for Overgrowth, and I hope that this will show in the final game.

What inspired you to create a game company? Was it from just being a gamer or some other influence?

My twin brother and I have been interested in video games since before I can remember. We’ve been interested in making games pretty much since we started playing them. When we were maybe seven years old, we actually mailed a letter to Lucas Arts, the creators of Monkey Island, asking if we could work on video games for them. They respectfully declined — but we were determined.

My brother is kind of a programming natural and actually started making video games, really, really early. He started making HyperCard games in maybe second grade, then moved on to BASIC games, and then progressed to full fledged, 3D games in high school. After he graduated college, we decided to make Wolfire official and start seriously developing games.

How many games has Wolfire released?

Overgrowth will technically be the 5th game, however, it will be Wolfire’s first “serious” game. The level of technology, quality, and the sheer amount of time and effort we are putting into Overgrowth dwarfs all of Wolfire’s other games combined.

When did you first hear about Disqus?

I heard about it right when you guys were getting started from my roommate who went to highschool with the founders. I finally got around to installing it on the Wolfire Blog and I was extremely impressed.

What’s your favorite feature within Disqus?

The most valuable to me is the threading and organization of the comments.  That has transformed the comment section of our daily blog from an unreadable mess into awesome conversations, where 100 comments is not unusual.

My favorite feature is probably Facebook Connect. Its awesome for Facebook users to not even have to sign in. I don’t really know how they do it but if you click the Facebook button, it just works!

If you could add one feature to Disqus, what would it be?

I think the next step is smart social media reactions. My dream feature would be to have Reddit, Digg, Facebook, and Twitter buttons at the top of the comments so that people could Digg, Tweet, etc. my blog posts without leaving the page, and with the click of a single disclosure triangle, could view the comments from Reddit, or people’s tweets, without them mixing in with my blog comments.

After Overgrowth is released, are there any other big titles planned?

For sure! We haven’t announced anything yet, but we have a ton of awesome game ideas brewing. Overgrowth is just the beginning.

What are you thoughts about computer games vs console games?

I own all three of the current gen consoles, so I’m a huge fan. While I love to play multiplayer games like Little Big Planet and Super Smash Brothers with my buddies on the console, ultimately I would never trade PC gaming for it.

The PC is a much more open platform — companies like Wolfire would not exist without it. The only games you’d ever see would be hand picked by Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft.

With that said, consoles are looking really nice from a developers perspective. It kind of sucks when you make a PC game and upwards of 90% of your downloads come from pirates. Most indie developers who have made it onto the consoles report that their game had much, much higher sales than on PC. It’s really hard to ignore that.

I think there is definitely room for all platforms. We support everything we can, including Mac and Linux. If Sony, Nintendo, or Microsoft let us on their platform, that would be very interesting.

Besides making games, what else are you passionate about?

I love all types of biking and probably bike around Berkeley more than I walk. I’m a pretty hardcore nerd and love all kinds of technology and the startup culture in general.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

One cool thing about our game engine is that we’ve embedded WebKit thanks to the Awesomium library. This means that all of the user interface elements you see in the game are created with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

In other words, don’t be surprised if you stumble across Disqus comments while you are playing Overgrowth.

If you would like to learn more about Jeff and his game company Wolfire visit their twitter, website, or Disqus Profile.

Each and every language translated on the Disqus comment system has been done by our users. We’ve added support for several new languages and we have a few more on the way:

Huge thanks to all our translators!

In this round: Branorac, Mu Yufan, Xoai, Svoinea, Omericit, Guhpraset, jardenberg, HenrikAI, Jonas Alvunger, Chokladkakan, and Juarez Polanco.

To change the language for your Disqus comments just visit your settings page and choose it from the drop-down. If you’d like to volunteer to help us translate, email translation@disqus.com. We are always looking to support more languages!