Bloggers are some of the most opinionated and vocal people out there. So when creating a product for bloggers, expect them to significantly shape the thing every step of the way.

Disqus is very much such a product. Late last week, we release what we dubbed Beta 2. That’s the label we’re giving to one of the biggest Disqus updates in a long time. And credit goes to you, wonderful Disqus user, for all the help in improving your favorite discussion service.

So what’s new?

Goodbye confusing forums, Hello community pages

Gone is the concept of forums from the interface. Many of you were confused on what these forums meant or were even used for. Starting now, they are placed with Disqus community pages. If your blog uses Disqus, it has a community page at my_blog_account.disqus.com. Here, you can easily access all the discussions of a blog without wading through the article archives. Also on this page, you will notice the blog’s community and top contributors prominently displayed.

(tip: if you used the forums, you can continue to use the community pages in a similar fashion)

Now Unobtrusive!

Partly due to the previously mentioned change, Disqus now feels much more like a natural extension of your blog. Links and actions do not annoyingly redirect commenters away.

Commenters can now login or register while posting their comments, all in a single action. We hope this will encourage more people to verify the commenter profiles they use around the web.

It’s More Social

Disqus profiles have been upgraded with more social-esque functionality. And in the spirit of being unobtrusive, profiles now pop up on the blog, displaying recent comments and links to other services such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

Be sure to connect services to your profile here: disqus.com/settings

Another way to add some social spice to your blog is through Disqus widgets. You can now add widgets to your blog to display your recent comments, top commenters, and even popular discussions.

It’s Easier to Manage

Comments are easier to manage with improved dashboard and admin interfaces, better spam filtering, and more access control.

There are now 4 main pages for blog admins.

• Dashboard lets you manage comments and threads.
• Configure is the configuration for the comment system
• Extras is where you’ll find the sidebar widgets
• Accesess & Moderators allows you to add moderators, set access rules, and manage your block list.

It’s also easier to add any Disqus user as a moderator of your blog. Just go to Access & Moderators, type in a name, and add permissions.

Moderators can remove comments or block commenters from the blog. Just hover over the commenter’s picture to bring up the menu.

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Here’s more of what you can find…

For Readers and Commenters:

• Change your display name (can be different from login name)
• More options when viewing a thread: change the sorting order or choose a flat view
• Edit comments, as long as no one has replied.
• Easier login/registration process
• OpenID support through Clickpass
• Connect social services to your profile such as Facebook and Twitter
• Claim unverified comments and merge with your profile
• New popup profiles that that display on the blog
• New community pages in place of forums

For Blog Admins/Moderators

• Manage threads from dashboard: Remove threads or just lock them so no new comments can be posted
• Restructured UI: Dashboard, Configure, Extra, and Access & Moderators
• Block lists: prevent users from posting by username, email, or IP address
• New admin menu. When viewing a comment thread, hover over a user’s picture to bring up the menu. You can then reveal the user’s IP address or email. If the comment is a bad one, choose to remove it or ban the commenter with a single click.
• Export comment data in RSS 2.0 or XML
• Add a moderator to your blog and fine-tune his permissions
• Sidebar widgets and community widgets to show top commenters, top discussions, or just recent comments

“Wait!” I hear you say, “Where’s ___________ [ insert promised feature ]?!”

Oh, we’re not done. It’s a rolling release. You’ll definitely be seeing more frequent and smaller updates as time goes on. We’ve spent the last couple months working on a bunch of different stuff – a lot was finished but most things are awaiting a little more polish. You won’t have to wait until a Beta 3, though, because new stuff is being pushed live all the time.

Improved Infrastructure!

We’re pretty proud over here of the fact that we have not had any major downtime since launching. In the last few weeks, an influx of new blogs, users, and overall activity along with a couple server flukes prompted us to spend time upgrading and tweaking the back end. Now, if you notice anything, you should be seeing a nice increase in performance.

Progress

So what else is going on? The nature of Disqus just makes it natural and ideal for us to be working with a few web services. True to that, we’re working on a couple things that we are very excited about.

Today, Disqus powers the discussion of over 4,000 blogs and websites. Check out our front page to see a handful of our favorites. Since we’ve been around, there’s been mild chatter on blogs about Disqus versus competing blog commenting services. While all of us companies are quite different in what we do, I understand the comparisons since we’re all working on improving conversation on websites. I decided to graph Disqus against a shortlist of the usual suspects (basically, the ones I see mentioned most often) and I am quite proud of how we’re doing.

It isn’t accurate (Compete.com underestimates) but it looks pretty good, no?

New friends to the team

Disqus was initially funded by Y Combinator and Paul Graham in the summer of 2007, which did wonders for the product and company. Today, we’re excited to be announcing more great investors that will help us improve and expand Disqus. Fred Wilson was a very early Disqus user, allowing us to test an alpha version of Disqus on his popular blog. His vocal blog community played a big part in helping us shape Disqus in its beginning stages. That’s why we’re excited to be working with Fred Wilson and Union Square Ventures, whose portfolio companies include personal favorites such as Twitter and Tumblr.

Along with Union Square Ventures, our new investors also include Naval Ravikant (founder of Epinions), Howard Lindzon (founder of Wallstrip), and Aydin Senkut (Googler). Each one adds something different to Disqus and we look forward to working with all of them.

Side note: I have yet to meet Howard in person, though we’ve spoken frequently online and I read his blog. And Howard’s been absolutely great with the advice and help (as with the others). Isn’t the Internet great?

Thanks

Thanks to all current Disqus users! Welcome, new Disqus users.

Also be sure to check out the new tour and FAQ for anything I may have missed covering.

Oh btw – Disqus is expanding the team! Are you a great Python hacker? Let us know: jobs@disqus.com