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.