How to embed Disqus comments on your website

Originally published on the Disqus blog on September 7, 2016

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.

Embedded comments let you bring the best comments in your community directly into the content you publish on any website. No longer will you need to take screenshots of comments to share in a blog post. Just use the auto-generated embed code and paste it directly into any HTML web page.

This is what it looks like:

Here’s how it works:

  1. Grab the direct link to the comment
  2. Visit https://embed.disqus.com/ and enter the link into the box
  3. Copy the embed code into a blog post or website and publish

https://blog.disqus.com/hs-fs/hubfs/embed-comments-walkthrough.png?width=854&height=391&name=embed-comments-walkthrough.png

Once published, embedded comments blends nicely alongside any content on a page. It includes the comment author’s name and avatar, the date it was posted, the full comment body including any formatting and media, and the vote count. It also automatically resizes and adapts to any screen size so that you never have to worry again about comment screenshots being squished for mobile users.

What can I do with embedded comments?

Embedding comments is super easy. With its flexibility, there are so many ways you can use it. Here are some ideas we recommend:

  1. Promote the top comments in your community

Recognition is a huge motivator in communities that can increase engagement from your commenters. Over at xoJane, they publish a “Comment of the Week” series where they recap the most interesting comments from their community. Promoting comments also lets you invite readers to join the discussion.

https://blog.disqus.com/hs-fs/hubfs/xojane-cotw.png?width=640&name=xojane-cotw.png

  1. Ask your readers a question

We encourage authors to be an active presence in the comments whether that’s replying to readers’ comments or asking them a question. A best practice to getting a new discussion going is to pose a question directly to your readers in a comment that you feature. Embed that question directly in your article so that readers are more likely to see it and share their thoughts.

  1. Create more compelling stories

When creating content, publishers care not only about it attracting an interested audience but one that leads to meaningful engagement. Engagement that sparks discussion, provide new perspectives, and connect readers closer to the story.

On The Atlantic, the director of a featured documentary in "Aging and Alone in Manhattan's Chinatown" shared the latest developments of the events depicted in the film.

On The Atlantic, the director of a featured documentary in "Aging and Alone in Manhattan's Chinatown" shared the latest developments of the events depicted in the film.