Getting Readers Engaged: WordPress Comments & Commenting Systems

http://photos3.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/7/e/d/9/600_443072473.jpeg

Whether you're blogging yourself or creating a site for a client, you need to make some decisions about how to handle comments. Blocking comment spam is important, of course, but there are also tools you might want to consider to increase user engagement.

Our sponsor for this meeting, Wheepl (https://whee.pl/), offers a platform for live, social conversation across webpages based on hashtags.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYqmEA9E3vo

In addition to Wheepl, we'll take a look at some other popular commenting solutions: Postmatic (https://gopostmatic.com/), Disqus (https://wordpress.org/plugins/disqus-comment-system/) (who sponsored a meetup many years ago), Livefyre (http://web.livefyre.com/comments/), Jetpack Comments (https://jetpack.me/support/comments/), etc. This is not a comprehensive tour of every comment system or plugin--that would take days. But it should give you an idea of the options that are out there for increasing engagement via comments.

In addition to our meeting sponsor, Wheepl (https://whee.pl/), I would like to thank our regular sponsors; Pagely (https://pagely.com/) and A2 Hosting (https://www.a2hosting.com/), as well as O'Reilly Media (http://www.oreilly.com/pub/cpc/1263). Pagely hosts our EastBayWP.com (http://eastbaywp.com) website; A2 buys us pizza, and O'Reilly offers us hefty discounts.