Why we’re giving JS-Kit’s Echo a shot

As of a few hours ago, comments here on The Inquisitr are powered by JS-Kit’s new Echo commenting and social aggregation service.

It’s not without a little bit of irony that after criticizing JS-Kit last year that they’re now supplying our comment platform. JS-Kit this time last year was a company that tended to lash out at competitors, something I still believe was unbecoming of a company that at its core is a community player in the social media scene. 12 months though is a long time, and JS-Kit has changed its tune and instead relies on innovation and selling itself to the market without attacking others in the space today.

Why change?

We’ve been mostly happy users of Disqus since very early on in The Inquisitr’s history. It was, and still is a good platform for comments. However there has been issues, particularly relating to spam. For weeks now I’ve had to spend time every morning deleting spam, blocking and marking it as I go, but it still got through. Spam is an issue on any site, but unfortunately Disqus has been doing a sub-standard job in picking it up. It wasn’t an issue with just The Inquisitr; other Disqus users I’ve spoken to confirmed that spam on Disqus is getting out of hand.

We looked at reverting back to native WordPress comments, however I’m still fond of the idea behind Disqus, IntenseDebate and JS-Kit: centralized comments, multiple comment options, and social service aggregation. Then JS-Kit’s Echo came along.

Echo offers a range of advantages over the competition, in particular live updating (good ol’ “Real Time Web”), additional aggregation options, and more depth in supported services. It’s an appealing package, and there’s only one way to test it, and that’s by using it.

So far, so good. We need to tweak the appearance on the page, but notably JS-Kit has placed spam missed by Disqus into moderation, and that’s got to be a good sign.

My thanks to Daniel Ha at Disqus for his previous assistance. Disqus still has a lot of potential, but I can’t help but think that Disqus is going through some growing pains at the moment. Competition is always good, and I hope Disqus get through the issues and go on to bigger and better things.

My thanks also to Chris Saad and Alex Peshkov at JS-Kit for setting Echo up for us.