After migrating my website from Blogger, I initially tried using WordPress’s native comment system, but I simply couldn’t stick with it—it lacks features and offers a limited experience. I considered Disqus’s paid plan, but after reviewing how it handles user data, I decided to seriously look for open source alternatives. That’s what led me to wpDiscuz.
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What Is wpDiscuz?
As the name suggests, wpDiscuz is a powerful WordPress comment plugin that brings dozens of features for both commenters and website admins. It stands out as the best AJAX-powered open source (at least its core) alternative to Disqus—a service I still don’t understand why many Linux and open-source-oriented websites continue to use, especially given its data-hungry nature and commercial exploitation of user information!
Why Not Disqus?
Disqus’s privacy policy allows for the sharing of user data with third parties for marketing and advertising services? This includes browser cookie data, IP addresses, location, device identifiers, and even personal preferences gleaned from your comments.
It suffered a significant data breach in 2012 (though it wasn’t publicly disclosed until 2017) that affected over 17.5 million users? The exposed data included email addresses, usernames, sign-up dates, last login dates, and for about one-third of users, weakly hashed passwords (SHA1).
What You Get as a Commenter with wpDiscuz
As a commenter, you get a fast, real-time commenting experience with a clean, modern interface and a feature-rich editor to personalize your thoughts.
You can like and vote on comments, mention and follow users, subscribe to replies, comment anonymously or via social login, and even earn badges as a registered member.
You can also leave comments directly on specific parts of the content using inline feedback (I haven’t enabled this yet due to some required CSS tweaks, but it’s on my roadmap).
You can even edit or delete your comments—something not usually possible with many commenting systems.
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What I Get as a Website Admin Using wpDiscuz
As a website admin, I appreciate having full control and ownership of the comment system since wpDiscuz relies on WordPress’s native comment structure. All comments are stored directly in my website database.
The plugin provides a highly customizable comment form with three clean, modern layouts and dozens of flexible filters—I even used them to create a custom spoiler button.
Spam protection is solid thanks to built-in reCAPTCHA and seamless integration with antispam plugins.
It also gives me helpful features like comment statistics, sorting options (newest, oldest, most voted), the ability to disable replies for specific threads, and pinning top comments. And yes, it’s SEO-friendly right out of the box.
In addition to these core features, wpDiscuz offers powerful paid add-ons. I plan to buy the full bundle soon to enhance the comment experience even further with features like comment reporting & flagging, voice comments, private messages, and user reputation titles.
💬 I invite you to try the commenting experience on Linux-Tech&More, powered by wpDiscuz. Let me know your thoughts and share your feedback right here. (Still using Disqus? You can log in with it below—if you must.)
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