At Disqus, we are proud and humbled to boast an expansive network of users. Since writers and publishers are always striving to learn more about their audience, we thought it was a good idea to ask our users what they read, how they read it, and why. We also asked questions around reader-publisher engagement and what content they pay for. To answer these questions, we recently conducted a survey and in just one day, we got 973 responses! Here’s a summary of the most interesting findings from our research.

Here’s a rundown of the biggest updates:

2 new tools to fight trolls, improve discussion quality, and save your team time!

We're excited to announce two new moderation features for publishers using Disqus Pro - Shadow Banning and Timeouts. With these new features at their disposal, moderators now have even more flexibility when dealing with troublesome users. While the traditional user banning feature is a great way for moderators to keep spammers and trolls out of their communities, a one size fits all solution is not always flexible enough to deal with different types of users. That's where Shadow Banning and Timeouts come into play.

WordPress is one of the most popular publishing platforms used by publishers on Disqus. Since its release, the Disqus WordPress plugin has empowered millions of publishers to increase reader engagement, retain readers, and foster thriving communities.

Earlier this year we wrote about our plans to release new versions of Disqus with optional advertising and new features to give publishers more options for growing and managing their audiences. We're excited to announce that recently we launched Disqus Pro and Disqus Plus, our first two subscription versions of Disqus.

It’s been a few weeks since we posted about our commitment to fighting hate speech, and in that time we’ve had many discussions internally about what it means to be active in this commitment. I’ve been working with a committee of Disqussers to consider our policies and actions: how we develop products and how we do business in accordance with our company values.

Here at Disqus, we love our users. We also respect our users and their privacy too. Over the years, we’ve introduced stronger privacy controls such as honoring the Do Not Track setting in browsers, implementing Content Security Policy headers to protect you from any possible XSS attacks, and supporting a solution for loading Disqus over HTTPS. Our Home and moderation interfaces are already HTTPS-only, and now we are proud to announce that our commenting system, Engage, is also HTTPS-only.

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.

As a publisher, you already measure reader engagement on social networks but what about the activity that happens on your site? Pageviews and time on site are a good start, but it doesn't tell the entire story. Today, we're excited to provide an early look at the next generation of engagement analytics on Disqus.