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.

• Real-time posting and updating. We’ve implemented posting and updating the comment thread without having to reload the page.
• Reaction is our feature that aggregates comments and other mentions of your post and displays them with your comments. This enables a true social, distributed discussion — with this release, Reactions are now faster and more reliable. Our aggregated results are powered by uberVU.com and Backtype.com.

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.

• New moderation panel. We started from scratch to make it the best way to moderate both large and small volumes of comments. Partially inspired by an email inbox, it was built to cut down on the amount of time spent on moderation.
• Improved automated tools, including a new spam filter and new ways to combat abusive language in comments.
• Other improved moderation tools such as multi-site moderation, multiple moderators, blacklists and whitelists.
• New theme customization options, such as the ability to set default avatar pictures for your site. These features are meant to give you better integration with your site.

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

• With this release, all profiles have vanity URLs. You can now access your public profile by going to disqus.com/{your username}
• Connect and merge services to your profile. You can enable the option to automatically share your comments on Facebook, Twitter, and other services.
• Disqus will now find comments that we think may be yours, and ask you if you’d like to merge or reject them.
• Full shared control with publishers. You have the ability to edit and delete comments without impacting the site that the comment is on.

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.