Alright, so our comment challenge with AMC has come to an end and we have some winners!

Each winner below will receive 2 AMC movie passes, one disqus tshirt, and a handful of stickers.

Best Nixon Impression! Won by Adam Teece

Do you have an amazing story? What was it? Won by Rick Stern

When I was young, I was always finding myself in trouble. I reckon it was because of my stunning looks and the way the ladies eyes just flourished my very being.I played the bass guitar and the kids called me slappy. I was the happiest bass player alive. I played in a band called the shoe shift settlers and it was grand. We would play four times a week at this joint called the shell shock.

Read More?

Would you ever want to age backwards? Why? Won by Evil Eye

At times yes. I don’t know that I trust anyone who says they have ‘no regrets’ in their lives.

I do. I have made mistakes. Would I go back in time? ONLY and I do mean only if I were assured that it would not change the person that I have become today. ONLY if I knew that it would not create some type of imbalance/shift in the world.

We learn from our mistakes and this is what makes Us who We are today.

Read More?

What would your reaction be if you one a million dollars? Won by Sukhjit Ghag

If you were to fight for a cause and possibly die for it, what would it be? Won by Scott

If I were to choose a cause, I’d have to select the fight against Noassatol.

I have long worn a denim ribbon to support the poor innocent victims of Noassatol. What is Noassatol, you ask? Noassatol is a tragic syndrome that affects men everywhere. Instead of having a nice firm bubble butt, men afflicted with this syndrome have no ass at all. Their blue jeans hang loosely where their round muscular buttocks should be. It’s so tragic. I am crying just trying to write about it.

Read More?

This was fun =) and I plan on having more mini contests very soon!

As some of you know, we’ve been receiving a good amount of spam from SEO rank climbers over the past couple weeks.

Who are these people and why are they doing this?

The acronym “SEO” in our case refers to “search engine optimizers,” a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform SEO services to gain a better ranking in search engines.

Unfortunately, we have been dealing with the more malicious users versus the kind legitimate type.

To help decrease this type of spam within our system we’ve added “nofollow” to our WordPress Plugin. This is a minor update but it is very essential. We apologize for the tardiness of this release and assure you that we are constantly working to improve Disqus. We will be having a bigger release in the next couple weeks, so keep your eyes peeled!

Download WordPress Disqus Plugin v2.04
UPDATE: 2.04.3996 was released due to a bug in 2.04.3953.

An account is a set of credentials, a method of authenticating (and logging out), and some profile information. A user is probably a person, but in general is the abstract basic actor on your system. These two things have always been identified with each other — whether in the database, /etc/passwd, or whatever before that that I wasn’t around for — but that’s now changing.

For example, here at Disqus, we’d like you to be able to login with your Disqus account, Facebook account, Google account, or OpenID. Ideally, authenticating with any of those methods would be equivalent, and all of your accounts would be linked. You could choose the preferred member of your account-set from which to get your profile picture;  you could choose what outbound actions to do through each account, like posting to your Facebook Newsfeed. But we aren’t there yet. Updating the database and UI are just a couple of the problems. Another is how to verify account equivalence, possibly in both directions — is this something there should be a standard for?

Accepting multiple account types is the first step towards reducing the number of account-spaces out there. Once a lot of sites start doing so, users will get accustomed to it, and technologies to assist the process will mature (like browser support for OpenID, or authentication-popup toolkits). Then, new sites will stop feeling like it’s necessary to have their own account-space, and consolidation to a few winners will begin. [1]

So, update your schemas: accounts-to-users is many-to-one.

Andrew
DISQUS
Developer
andrew@disqus.com

[1] There have been a couple attempts (Passport, OpenID) to move directly from a local one-to-one to a new, global one-to-one. There’s too much friction for that work, so it feels artificial. Stack Overflow is very premature in accepting only OpenID, but it’s for the greater good. They can get away with it since it’s a site for developers and has no serious competition.

This weekend AMC will be hosting an event showing five films back to back have been nominated for the 2009 Oscars: Milk, The Reader, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Slumdog Millionaire, and Frost/Nixon.

They invited your Community Manager (raises hand) to partake in the all day movie blogging extravaganza. There will be unlimited popcorn, giggles, maybe a couple tears, and some good memories. AMC was kind enough to unload 10 free movie passes so you may join the fun with me remotely.

How do I win these movie passes?

Well, I just happened to have devised a contest for each film.

• Visit: http://contest.disqus.net for all the rules.
  (note: the passes are good for any AMC theatre)

I will also be blogging and posting pictures from the event. If you are attending one of the many showing around the states join the Flickr group or tweet about it using hash code #amcbps. If it so happens to be the San Francisco be sure to say hi.

Is the showing in your area? Visit: http://www.amctheatres.com/promos/showcase/ and find out.

Good luck!

We’ve been pretty quiet this past week but it has been for good reasons. The team has been working hard on a solution for the rise in spam, finishing our Facebook Connect integration, and warmly welcoming our new back-end developer Devin Naquin.

Devin was an intern during the Summer of 2008 at Disqus and developed the reblog functionality we now all enjoy. We’re all really excited to have him on the team but I will let him introduce himself more.

I will have more updates about the status of our improvements to the handling of spam and the integration of Facebook Connect next week.

Oh yeah, I will be having a Disqus contest next week, so keep your eyes peeled!

Cheers,

We’ve polished up our FriendFeed integration:

• Tumblr sites will now sync.
• A drop-down menu has been added to Admin section for ease of use and stability.
  note: If you are not the owner of the site you’ll see something like this.
  

Site and Account Deletion:

• You may now add your site or your account to the removal queue.
  • How do I delete my site?
  • How do I delete my account?

Email Notifications:

• Spam email notifications have been disabled temporarily.

Added a couple new languages to our arsenal:

• Dutch by Peter Stuifzand
• Lithuanian by Vladas Palubinskas

If you see any language errors or something just does not seem right, feel free to email translation@disqus.com. If you’re curious about all the languages we support, or would like to help translate a language not supported by Disqus, check our wiki for more information.

Cheers,

The Disqus Docs Wiki is your resource for all documentation, including support answers, tutorials, and development docs. As some of you may have experienced, the forums have not the best solution for archiving this information. In a nutshell we needed a central and more suitable place to store this knowledge.

Our goal is to simplify your understanding of Disqus, no matter which publishing/website platform you’re using across the web.

Over this past weekend you may have noticed a slight increase in spam. This particular spam is being done by actual people not entirely violating our terms of service. Now that this has been brought to our attention, we are going to make the necessary changes to our terms of service and add a couple new layers of spam protection.

Which notifications are spam and which are not?

If you do receive an email notification with the following message it is being caught by our spam filters. This is good thing =)

NOTE: This message has been flagged as spam. You may respond with “Delete” to delete this message, “Approve” to approve this message, or “Spam” to mark this message as spam. You may also respond with your response to automatically approve the post and post your response at the same time.

If you receive a notification without the above message and feel that it is spam you have a couple of options:

1. Mark the comment as spam
   • Visit: Howto: Mark Spam
2. Block the user
   • Visit: Account Permissions
   • Scroll down to Block Lists
   • Add the Username or IP Address of the user
     
3. If it is consistent spam feel free to forward the full email notification to help@disqus.com