This article was published on November 8, 2012

Disqus rolls out new fonts, absolute timestamps and languages, limits downvoting to logged-in users


Disqus rolls out new fonts, absolute timestamps and languages, limits downvoting to logged-in users

Disqus today announced a new version of its commenting platform that it says is “based on feedback from thousands of communities.” The new features are both visual and functional, so this is a big update worth “disqusing”.

The new Disqus has received font styles: comment text will now switch to a serif font “when appropriate.” Furthermore, all appearance options are now available as manual overrides on the Admin Settings page.

As part of these visual changes, Disqus is also offering new feature to emphasise moderator comments with custom badge text; here’s how it looks:

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Speaking of the comment interface, there’s now a new hover state that shows the absolute timestamp. Also, the new Disqus fully supports seven languages (French, Spanish, German, Portugues, Russian, Swedish, Turkish) in addition to English, although of course you can write your comments in whatever tongue you please.

Aside from all these visual changes, the biggest improvement in our eyes is a big tweak in the community rules: downvoting a comment is now reserved for users who are logged in. This is a big deal as it should limit spammers and trolls from downvoting great comments in order to surface their nonsense to the top.

Again on the Admin settings page, Disqus has reorganized the community rules to make it clearer how to configure whether guest users can comment on your site and whether to send certain types of comments to pre-moderation.

Disqus says there are more changes to come, and points to its Release Notes page, which at the time of writing hasn’t yet been updated. Whether it is or not, we will keep you posted on what’s new. After all, we recently switched to Disqus and we’re enjoying the commenting service quite a bit.

See also – DISQUS launches “Discovery box” to help your readers find new content and conversations

Image credit: Martin Lundgren

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