We’ve been quiet the last few weeks. Our most recent releases primarily focused on usability fixes and back end improvements, but Disqus hasn’t made any huge announcements as of late. Disqus has been working on a few things which we’re giddy about, and I think it’s time we started making some noise again.

The main goal of this is to hear your thoughts and concerns throughout the development and release of a new feature. Disqus has over 55,000 websites in the network (and closing in on 1 million commenter profiles); new features and changes in the service impact a lot people and we want to know that every move we make is a good one for most.

I’ll go into some more detail about new features in a future blog post. Some current issues that we are focused on fixing are better spam handling, fixing OpenID support, internationalization support, fuller API documentation, and improving the moderation tools.

One of the first things I’ll make noise about is the introduction of two new members of the Disqus team, both starting this week: Anton and Giannii.

Anton comes all the way from Uzbekistan to help work on many of the new features coming into Disqus. We were so impressed with his knowledge, ideas, and technical ability that we had to pull him out of his country and into San Francisco. Case in point: Anton fixed a Disqus bug while on his flight to SFO.

I am proud of the way that Disqus communicates to the community of Disqus users. There’s quite a few of you now. Giannii has joined the team as our community manager and will be helping the rest of us better understand Disqus and the people using it. Most importantly, he will be making sure Disqus continues to be the service that makes all of you happy. He has a lot of experience in this area and we’re excited about his ideas.

I’ll let both Giannii and Anton introduce themselves here and talk a bit about what they’ll be up to at Disqus.