Telegraph communities: the arrival of Disqus and BuddyPress – Telegraph Blogs

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Kate Day

Kate Day is Social Media and Engagement Editor for The Telegraph. Follow @kate_day on Twitter to see what Kate's doing now.

Telegraph communities: the arrival of Disqus and BuddyPress

I have been very quiet on this blog for far too long – and in the last few weeks that has actually meant silent. Many apologies, in particular to all the photographers who have missed the competition. Normal service will resume as of now.

As well as apologising, I'd like to explain a little bit about what I've been up to. For several months I have been hiding away in the Telegraph lab rethinking the way we do commenting and reader blogging across Telegraph.co.uk.

The last few years have seen huge changes in the relationships between news organisations and their audiences online. As has been said many times before, the days of a journalist talking at their audience are gone, audiences are now talking right back at you. Better still, they are talking with you. The best of these exchanges – in comment threads, in the blogosphere or on social networks – can inform and extend discussion, take a subject off down fascinating tangents, amuse and delight. But these changes, and the technological advances that have fuelled them, have been very rapid and a hybrid of different systems evolved in different parts of Telegraph.co.uk. Many of these worked well as long as readers stuck to one particular area of the site and commented in one particular way but the overall experience was inflexible and messy – for readers, journalists and moderators alike.

So the challenge was both technical and editorial. First we needed to streamline the technology so that one login allowed readers to comment anywhere on Telegraph.co.uk and also to join our reader blogging site My Telegraph. This would involve merging three separate commenting systems, all with different registration systems, and require us to rethink My Telegraph entirely as this was hosted by a third party.

But I also wanted to consider what else we could do to encourage interesting conversations and minimise the impact of spammers and troublemakers. I started exploring where these kinds of online discussions were working well and examining what readers and journalists could gain from this kind of engagement. Much of this thinking began during conversations with my predecessor Shane Richmond and then continued after he moved to head up the Telegraph's technology coverage in August last year.

Comments and reader blogs are now provided by Disqus and BuddyPress

Comments and reader blogs are now on the Disqus and BuddyPress platforms

Our solution has been to plug the Telegraph's own registration system into two platforms, one of which powers comments across Telegraph.co.uk and the other gives every reader a profile and the option to set up a blog, join discussion groups and create a network of other readers. This same registration system allows readers to sign up for various Telegraph services, including email newsletters and our subscriber website, and this expanding all the time. For comments we have partnered with Disqus, a terrific start up based in San Francisco which impressed not only because of the range of tools on offer but also because of their understanding of the dynamics of conversations on the web.

Reader profiles, blogs and discussion groups are now built in BuddyPress, a platform that adds social networking features (such as profiles) to WordPress MU. Last summer we moved our journalists' blogs to WordPress so in many ways this was a natural extension of that project for us. A development team here at the Telegraph have now built on the excellent work of Andy Peatling and the BuddyPress team and created a version of BuddyPress specifically for our readers.

Two features of BuddyPress were particularly attractive for us. First, and most importantly, member profiles. The anonymity of commenters is often blamed when online discussions become abusive. To my mind, a consistent identity is the key. Some people may have legitimate reasons for wanting to comment with a pseudonym and, short of taking everyone's bank details, it would be impractical to try to force people to use their real name. But people are much less likely to become abusive if they have a consistent online identity and if all their activity is collected in one place. Relationships online, just like relationships in the real world, don't spring up overnight and it's very difficult to build any kind of meaningful conversation if you don't know who you are talking to. We have a moderation team who deal with nasty or legally problematic material. By also encouraging people to use a single identity and build a reputation, I hope we have created a platform which encourages interesting discussions as well as one that is better at stamping out the most abusive behaviour.

The second BuddyPress feature that appealed to us was groups. Readers and journalists have long complained that it was difficult to find content that interested them on our reader blogging site. The stream of latest blog posts worked well for very committed bloggers who like to keep an eye on everything that goes on on My Telegraph but not so well for people who came looking for conversations about a specific topic. I hope that our new discussion groups will help to gradually build audiences who share common interests and give members an insight into what is coming up in the relevant section of the Telegraph.co.uk.

So we have now moved over 100,000 accounts, more than 5 million comments and 33,000 blog posts to a new home. We are nearing the end of the tidy up process and I hope we have put in place strong foundations that will allow us to build an engaged and engaging audience over the next few years. Many thanks to everyone who helped to turn my scribbles on the back of an envelope into something real. I'll spare you an Oscar-style list of names but particular thanks to Adrian McShane and Scott Jones who led our technical and design teams. The expertise of the team at Disqus, First Clarity and of Dave Coveney's WordPress wizards at Interconnect IT was also invaluable.

And now, I promise to resume normal blogging service….

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