Recently, we polled readers and commenters about the reasons why they downvote comments. While we often get feedback about how downvotes work on Disqus, it’s less common for us to hear about why people downvote comments. By understanding these motivations and goals, this paves the way towards improving how voting works in the future. Today, we’re sharing the results of our research and summarizing the feedback you provided.

Have you seen Avengers: Infinity War yet? If not, please stop reading and don’t come back until you do. Because spoilers, duh.

One of the year’s most anticipated blockbuster movies is shattering box office records faster than we can say “Nidavellir..?” Avengers: Infinity War is not only the must-see movie in theaters right now, it has given commenters on Disqus plenty to talk about these last few week (119,293 comments have been posted relating to the movie).

If you’re getting started with learning a new piece of software, it’s sometimes easier to just watch a video that shows you how things work than combing through several help articles.

Strong relationships with our publishers and users are essential. A critical part of these relationships is establishing trust and confidence, which is why privacy has always been a priority. Over the last several years we made regular updates, geared towards respecting users’ privacy and ensuring a safe experience on Disqus.

Before we start, there is something we should state upfront: the ability to downvote comments in Disqus never went away. You can still downvote comments which will affect the order they appear in a discussion when using the Best sort. We simply hide how many downvotes a comment has received and only show the total upvotes.

Welcome to volume 2 of our, What We’re Reading, blog post series. In case you missed our last post, this is a new series where we aim to share our favorite articles, posts, and reports, relevant to digital publishing, with our publishers, readers, and blog subscribers. As always, we love to hear your opinions about these articles and others that you are reading. So, be sure to share your thoughts in a comment below.

We know that many publishers use Google Analytics to understand their site's traffic. Perhaps that also includes Disqus Analytics for insights about your readers' engagement. Wouldn't it be convenient if you could capture Disqus commenting activity within Google Analytics?

In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to start tracking total new Disqus comments in Google Analytics. Once configured, you’ll be able to measure the number of comments your readers are posting alongside the metrics you already track with Google Analytics such as page views and time on site.

Last month, we asked readers and commenters to tell us why they subscribe to email newsletters. With more publishers investing in growing their email lists, we wanted to hear from you on where you stand. Specifically, we wanted to know if you currently subscribed to any email newsletters and if so, why. Today, we’re sharing the results of that research and summarizing what we learned from the feedback you provided.

If you want to increase reader engagement, knowing how much engagement your content is generating is only half the story. You also need to understand who your audience is to make more informed decisions about your strategy and identify ways to better serve them.

Here at Disqus, we use Trello as our project management tool of choice. Trello lets us plan out our projects in ways that make sense to both developers and product managers. Trello’s Power-Ups library let us integrate Trello with our other existing tools so that they can work seamlessly together.

Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re open-sourcing two internal tools our team uses to get more done with Trello.