Over the past month we’ve been talking to publishers of all sizes about our plans for 2017. During this process we’ve picked up some great feedback that we look forward to incorporating in future releases. In the meantime, we want to clarify our intent to keep Disqus free to use and address some frequent questions about advertising.

Free speech is a fundamental part of the Disqus network. We power diverse discussions across millions of websites, reaching billions of readers. Our platform enables people from across the web and around the world to share, discuss, and debate issues and their beliefs. Whether or not we personally identify with everything posted on our network, we believe in the right to speak our minds and share our ideas.

Going into 2017, more than ever, we see publishers investing in tools to build their own, site-specific, communities and engage with their audiences. Some of the examples that we see from top publishers are premium or paid content, subscriptions, newsletters, and site-specific account systems. The unifying theme across all of these tactics is a desire to have more control over audiences and more powerful means of engaging and retaining readers. Our goal is for Disqus to amplify these tools and tactics to help publishers who use them be more successful. To do this we will release new, subscription-based versions of Disqus later this year that will give publishers more control over their audiences and more customization options.  

Recently, we rolled out several sweet updates to the Moderation Panel to reduce the time one spent moderating. With Priority Sort, moderators can now quickly focus on the comments that need the most attention first. Searching for comments is now faster and easier with the new Filter tool that lets you view comments by issue. Lastly, smart comment tags provides much-need context about a comment in moderation.

On October 20, 2016, Livefyre announced the shutdown of its official WordPress plugin. As a result, any new site owners will no longer be able to add comments to their site.

Today, we're excited to announce powerful updates to the moderation panel to help reduce the time you spend moderating comments. Moderation curates discussions to encourage a broad range of opinions to be heard and thoughtful interactions to occur, but it shouldn’t take away the time you need on growing and fostering quality engagement with your audience.

Today we’re excited to announce a new, Disqus-exclusive ad-position for Reveal. Reveal’s new in-thread ad-position allows publishers to take advantage of brand new inventory. We built in-thread to help more publishers earn more revenue from their engaged communities.

Today, Disqus becomes the first comment system with support for Google AMP. To get more audience engagement on your website from mobile devices, get started with the installation instructions on our Github: https://github.com/disqus/disqus-install-examples/tree/master/google-amp

Great comments give your community a unique personality and a reason for people to come back. Upvotes, featured comments, and replying to comments are several ways you can acknowledge and recognize your top contributors. Now, there’s a new, more powerful option to add to your toolkit: embedded comments.

Good news! We have some new updates coming to Disqus over the next several weeks. Included in this update are several enhancements to the platform, including new features to Engage, the comment system, and improvements to Reveal, the integrated native advertising solution.

Because there’s a lot to this update, we are rolling it out in waves to users.