Notes on the redesign of Wizbang and the new features and functions.
Disqus Commenting System
Registration
Long time Wizbang commenters may wonder what this newfangled commenting system is all about. Well with our move to WordPress we implemented Disqus to provide many of the advanced features we had before and go to a registration required commenting system.
We had been threatening to make registration a requirement for a long time to better manage our comment section. The benefit of implementing Disqus is that many of our readers already have a Disqus registration that they use on other sites. Thousands of top sites already use Disqus, so you might have an account already. If so you just need to login once and you’re done.
If you don’t have a Disqus account there are a wide variety of authentication and web services where you may already have an account that you can use to sign in. You’ll see Facebook, Twitter, Open ID an more as options to login.
If you want to use a pseudonym, we suggest signing up with Disqus. You will have to use a valid e-mail address but the display name is something you can edit – you don’t have to use your real name.
When you register with Disqus you may not be able to register your normal Wizbang name as the login name. This is to be expected as there are millions of Disqus accounts. Your login name has to be unique on Disqus, but it doesn’t have to be your commenting screen name. That you change in your Disqus profile after signing up. You can change your profile and have the name your comments appear under be totally different than your Disqus login name.
@mentions
Disqus @mentions allows you to pull people into new conversations by mentioning them in your comments.
Before @mentions, commenting threads were an island. There wasn’t a way to reach out to people who weren’t already participating. Now with @mentions, you can call out your friends or friendly social media gurus, and get them involved in the conversation.
To begin using @mentions, just type the @ symbol and then continue typing the name of the person you’d like to mention. As you type you will see a drop down list of suggested users to choose from. The drop down is smart; it will update with increasingly accurate suggestions the further you type.
Disqus supports mentioning Disqus and Twitter usernames in the elsewhere category. This is a way to mention people directly on Disqus or Twitter when they don’t exist in the current conversation. Disqus users will receive an email notifying them of their mention, while Twitter users will get a friendly @mention from our spiffy Twitter bot.