If you are passionate about something and want to make it better, the easiest way is just to start improving it. And that is why I am here, implementing new features and fixing bugs.

As for my background, you can find it on my linkedin page. I also have a blog where I post some random stuff, mostly about my work. And if you want to contact me personally and you are not a spammer, feel free to write at anton@disqus.com.

Anton

P. S. San Francisco is nice.

If you have not heard, I am your Community Manager here. Some of you may not know who I am or what a community manager does. Don’t worry, I shall explain it all!

My name is Giannii and I have been doing community management for several years now, from hand held game communities to most recently helping companies like coComment. My calling is meeting new people, inspiring, conversing, and cultivating smiles across many faces. Essentially, I’m your chief happiness engineer. =P  If you have any issues, opinions, suggestions, or ideas, feel free to ping me at any of the following;

• help@disqus.com
• our forums
• twitter or my personal one
• get satisfaction

Also, if you want to learn more about me you can check out my personal blog, my disqus profile, or email me.

Talk soon!

Giannii

Community Manager

giannii@disqus.com

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.

Just the other day, Outbrain released a neat little update that allows it to be aware if the blog is using Disqus. It then presents the option to comment to Disqus while rating the blog post. It’s a small integration, and a nice way to show how blog applications can interact with each other without the blogger having to explicitly choose to install both as a package.

We like Outbrain and hope to do more with them and other complementary services with this approach: simple benefits that don’t require additional fiddling with options.

We’re excited to see what people come up with. And of course, the Disqus API is still improving frequently, so let us know what could be better.

The Disqus team just came back from this past weekend’s Blogworld Expo in Las Vegas. We spoke to hundreds of bloggers and publishers who were excited about what we were doing, as well as met many existing Disqus fans. How people perceive the importance of blog discussion is changing quickly. When we first started Disqus, it was difficult to communicate to people how this service works — this was because there was nothing quite like it before. Now, we can see that the Disqus just makes sense to people when we talk about it to them.

Today, Automattic (the team behind the WordPress platform) announced their acquisition of IntenseDebate, a competing and similarly-focused comment service. From all of us at Disqus: congrats to the ID team on joining the Automattic family. We’re fans of WordPress here (this blog uses it), so I think it’s good that they’re beginning to pay more attention to the comments.

So what does this mean for us? The Disqus comment system is still the largest third-party comment system on WordPress, yet those blogs represent under 5% of all websites using Disqus. We pride ourselves on being an independent cross-platform service. Disqus will continue to innovate and provide the best discussion experience on blogs. Our company’s entire focus is on increasing the number and quality of your comments and that will never change.

As a true third-party system, Disqus can be open and extensible to other services and platforms, as well as offer unique functionality not limited by a single platform. I’m looking forward to the future of discussion and I hope you’ll experience it with Disqus.

We had been considering this move for a while. Then at DjangoCon, we learned that our framework of choice had improved to the point where it was actually pretty easy. Knowledge isn’t all we acquired at DjangoCon: we also got Malcolm Tredinnick, a core Django developer, working with us for one intensive week to improve our database code even further. So thanks Malcolm, thanks Django, and sorry to anyone who was affected this morning.

1) Disqus will be at Blog World Expo next weekend, September 19th through the 21st. If you, fellow blog friends, will be there then come find us and obtain your own Disqus t-shirt. If you have a support request, we’ll also help you fix it on the spot.

2) We are seeking the right people to join our team. Currently open positions include: Back-end engineer, Front-end engineer, Community support, and a software developer intern. All the details are located on our jobs page.

And now, I leave you with a few pictures that were tagged “disqus” on Flickr.

Watch a quick introduction to reblogging comments:

Comments Can Be Blog Posts

We think so too.

A lot of great conversation goes on in comments that shouldn’t be stuck behind the fold. Publishing these back to traditional blogs is a great way to bring attention to great content. It needs to happen more often.

That’s why we’ve been trying to make it even easier.

Announcing Reblogging on DISQUS

Now on comments throughout DISQUS, you can find a reblog link where you can publish a quotation of the comment to your blog. This quote is cited with the original author, the blog where it originally appeared, and a link back to the original comment to give the discussion full context.

At the moment, we’re supporting publishing to Wordpress, Movable Type, TypePad, and Tumblr with more platforms to come.

So next time you see a comment that everyone really needs to read, give it a whirl. We’re excited to see more good content bubble to the surface.

Originally posted as a comment by Devin on A VC using Disqus.