What Happens When Webizens Can't Comment

Those of us who are familiar with blogs and websites that allow us to give our two cents and place our comments on the pages of the site know just how empowering such an ability can be. Your voice can be heard by not only the webmasters, but by the masses. But what happens when a website's comments section isn't working as it should be? The masses are silenced. That's exactly what happened last month when Disqus's comments services went down, leaving the Twitter community abuzz.

The Importance of a Comments Section

A healthy comments section is of the utmost importance to many Internet users. One of the most popular services that supports these comments sections had significant downtime this past April. While comments could, at times, be loaded, posting new comments was all but impossible. This didn't just affect the reputation of Disqus however. It also affected the reputations of all of the sites that utilize Disqus's services for the comments portion of their websites. What the Public Had to Say

So how did the public take to Disqus's failure to maintain proper performance? Not very kindly. One Product Review post stated, "Having a healthy comment section is important to internet users, and it appears that one of the most popular services Disqus is down at the moment, or not working as effectively as it normally should. Confirmation on the Disqus server status has been verified too, with a brief Disqus outage displayed on the server checker.

As far as we’re aware, Disqus is working sporadically but more often than not – Disqus comments are not loading. This is obviously frustrating for us since we use the service, but more frustrating for the rest of you who cannot get your opinions across in a timely manner."

And that is one of the many reasons why website monitoring service is so valuable. Disqus users who monitor their sites knew the service was down and could communicate with their visitors and customers accordingly. The rest of the sites that use Disqus were left in the lurch, leaving it up to disgruntled visitors to alert them of the problem.