Disqus Best Practices

Disqus is a great commenting tool that many SNworks sites use. It has several benefits including: allowing for multiple moderators, automatic moderation (spam prevention) and the ability to earn revenue with their Discovery program.

There are though a few best practices to keep your site less-spamy.

Under General Settings:

• Guest Commenting - Don't allow
• Pre-moderations - Change to 'non-verified'. This way if someone makes a fake email address the comment shouldn't be live right away
• Links in comments - Require these to be reviewed to avoid spam
• Flagged comments - Enable so moderators are notified when a comment is flagged by a reader. And also choose how many flags warrant an automatic takedown of the comment.
• Automatic Closing - We recommend setting a time window for commenting to close for a story. Usually two weeks to a month is a good window for commenting while a story is still timely.

Under Filters:

• Restricted words - They've got a good starter lists of swears that will automatically mark a comment for review. By default no words are restricted.
• Blacklist - If users are repeatedly using the same anonymous logins you can block them.