As we were announcing the new hires at PrestoSports, we also added a comments system to our blogs site.  I've included a screenshot of what the comment field looks like along with a few of the most recent posts.

We've been talking about this idea ever since we first launched the blog site, but there were a number of features we wanted in a comments system, and nothing quite seemed to fit our needs.  We've decided to launch with Facebook social plugin's comment tool as it better matched our needs than other tools like Disqus.

Here's what we were looking for and why.

Moderation

We need to make sure that there is a straight-forward and effective way to manage the comments that are coming from readers.  We want a system that can either allow posts to show immediately or require approval before appearing.  The system should be flexible enough to notify moderators when something needs approval or if something is posted that might need to be hidden.  Also, the more the tool can automatically block inappropriate content, the better.  Facebook's social plugin had all the options we needed, and we're evaluating how effective it is at notifying moderators, blocking spam, blocking users, and other moderator tools.

Posting using various accounts

We don't want to require registration to comment on an article.  That creates a big barrier to people communicating, and we wanted to let someone post with whatever widely adopted accounts they have.  In that respect, Facebook's tool was great a year ago, but now it's mediocre since it's dropped support for Google and Twitter.  These options are still technically available if we wanted to hack the tool,  but we want to stay out of the middle of Facebook and Google fighting for global supremacy.  We're hopeful that Facebook adds back support for Google in the near future.

Manageability

No tool is going to be worth it if it requires our users to learn custom HTML clips that are hard to install, so we wanted one that's very easy to setup.  Facebook's is pretty good here, but there are challenges with configuring who is the moderator, so it's something we hope to improve going forward.

Metrics

You need to get statistics on what are popular articles.  Simply giving users the ability to interact with you without the insight to know what is popular is pretty pointless in my book, and Facebook's open graph protocol allows us to tie in the comments data into our analytics system.  This will allow us to combine graphs of website traffic, search results, Facebook likes, and comments interactivity all in one central report.  Then you can see what content is a hit in different mediums.

Searchable comments

Finally, we wanted to allow our system to grab the comments and include it in the page so that search engines would find this information.  This will directly lead to the growth of the number of search results landing on your site instead of some other recruiting or media site.  Most basic embed tools do not support this, but Facebook's open graph protocol does.  However, we have to determine how important comments are to our customers and the amount of software development this will take before we would prioritize it.  Nonetheless, that would be very cool.

Next steps

This is a potentially cool feature, but not one we're ready to roll it out just yet. We envision it being a beneficial tool for you to engage fans and drive traffic to your releases. We're going to leave it on our blogs site for now while we think through the solutions.