DiscussIT – Tools for the moderation, curation and analysis of user generated content

The new DiscussIt Plugin for WordPress (v1.5) has lots of new features including:

• Spam-Protection
  (without annoying captchas!)

• JavaScript comments

• New moderation types

As well as improvements to the admin interface.

We’ve taken a novel two-pronged approach to combating WordPress comment spam. Most WordPress comment spam comes from ‘spam-bots,’ which are programs that inject comments directly into your wordpress blog or automatically fill out comment forms without any human involvement. For this reason a lot of anti-spam systems use ‘Captchas,’ which make users fill out a form to prove they’re human before they are allowed to post comments. We believe this puts users off getting involved in the discussion so, instead we’ve used hidden forms to provide protection against spam-bots and, if you choose to use our JavaScript based comment system, you’ll get even greater protection because spam-bots tend not to be able to handle JavaScript.

As well as adding robust spam-protection for your WordPress blog, the new DiscussIt plugin now supports two different moderation types:

Post-Moderation shows unapproved comments on the blog before they’ve been moderated. and Pre-Moderation hides comments until they’ve been moderated.

For more details see the DiscussIt WordPress Plugin page.

We’ve just added Dailymotion videos to our list of media that can be embedded into a discussion with the DiscussIt widget. There are no quirky tags needed to instruct the widget to embed the video, simply paste the url of a video into your comment and it will appear inline once posted.

Here is a full list of other formats we support, if your have a suggestion for any other embeddable media you would like us to support then leave a comment below.

Image thumbnailing
Supported extensions include: jpg, gif, png, jpeg.

Videos
The following video sites are supported: YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, Metacafe.

Audio
We currently just support Audioboo and mp3 files, there are probably many more we should support?

Documents & Other
We used to support Scribd.com documents, but this is currently broken (fix on the way). eBay listings are support though.

An update to our desktop moderation client ‘DiscussIt Moderator’ has been released (v2.035). DiscussIt Moderator is our desktop comment moderation tool, providing real time push notification of new comments.

As part of this update we have re-written the mentions section of the application. The idea of the mentions section is to provide a quick and easy way of finding where your site, or tracked keywords are being mentioned elsewhere on the internet. At present we are just searching the Twitter stream, but we hope to add other sources over time. Multiple filters per site can be added so you can keep an eye on your competition as well as important keywords.

We’ve also given the GUI a little spring clean, particularly the left hand side sites menu. Here we have spaced things out a little better and added a count of the un-approved comments in each site. Which makes all the difference whilst moderating multiple sites.

Next up we are going to improve the display of comments, to better support the moderation of comments that include images, videos and links to other sites.

If you’ve not yet installed DiscussIt Moderator to manage your web sites comments, give it a go and please give us feedback on your views and suggestions for improvement.

Download the DiscussIt Moderator application, it’s FREE!

[updated to 1.0.1 - changed to new API endpoint]

Download: HERE

Updated installation and administration guide is available here.

The DiscussIt plugin for Joomla! is out of beta with version 1.0, which is more robust and easier to set up than ever!

Users of older versions of the plugin wanting to upgrade should uninstall previous versions of the plugin (instructions: Joomla 1.5, Joomla 1.6) before installing version 1.0 – if you are upgrading from version 0.7.1 or higher your comments will not be lost during the upgrade.

New Features:

• - Simplified installation for Joomla 1.6
• - Added widget module that can be placed almost anywhere (including inside your articles)
• - No longer requires cURL (can use url_fopen too)
• - widget width can be set to AUTO
• - Comments link user-customizable

A new version of the DiscussIt Moderator air application is now available (v2.034). This version adds push notifications to it’s toolset which is something we have been looking into for quite some time. The overall moderation experience is greatly enhanced. You’ll be aware of new comments instantly and team member changes will show as they happen.

Download the DiscussIt Moderator application, it’s FREE!

get the latest version here.

Downloads:

for Joomla! 1.5: click here

for Joomla! 1.6: click here

The latest release of the DiscussIt plugin for Joomla! adds support for additional languages from our translation project. So far, thanks to the help of our users, we have added support for Spanish, French, Hungarian, Brazilian Portuguese and Russian.

New languages will be added automatically with no need for additional downloads.

If you would like to help us translate the DiscussIt Joomla plugin into more languages you can apply to do so using this form.

We’ve had numerous requests and kind offers of help to provide alternative languages for DiscussIt. We are happy to let you know that we are now ready to accept translations. If you wish to help us translate DiscussIt please fill in this from and we’ll get back to you with instructions on how to proceed.

The translations will be available for the JavaScript widget and Joomla plugin.

UPDATE
We have received a great response to the DiscussIt translation project. With thanks to Luis, ya-pinki, Nielsen, Catherine, Manó, Raoul, Benny, Pigi, Nikola, Oskar, Marcel & Chris we have translated the following languages;

Spanish
Russian
Portuguese (Brazil)
French
Hungarian
Italian
Dutch
Slovak
Serbian
Polish
German
Greek

You can see the working translations in action on our demo page. Language support has been added into the current version of the Joomla plugin.

Get the latest version here.

[Update 21st June 2011] bug-fix release 0.8.2

Version 0.8 (beta) of the DiscussIt Plugin for Joomla! has been released for versions 1.5 and 1.6 of Joomla!

To get your hands on a copy for Joomla! 1.5 click here, Joomla 1.6 users click here.

For installation instructions go to the Knowledge Base here.

What’s new in version 0.8?

• Improved Categories
  • This latest version of the plugin no longer uses comma separated values for selecting categories. Instead, it is properly integrated with the Joomla! API, allowing you to select categories by title.
• Streamlined SEO
  • SEO text is now only shown to search engine spiders, improving performance of the plugin.
• Simplified Installation for Joomla! 1.5
  • Coming soon for Joomla! 1.6

Logging in DiscussIt Moderator

The statistics section has had an extra graph added to show you the most popular threads on your site.

Exciting times ahead for the next release. We are looking into making the application receive push notifcations for new comments. Currently we poll every 30 seconds asking our servers ‘anything new yet?’. Using push notifcations should improve the clients performance and reduce our servers workload.

The DiscussIt Moderator application is an Adobe Flex application and so can be run on Windows, Linux or Mac.

Get the latest version here

Version 0.7 of the DiscussIt plugin for Joomla! is available now!

Click here for the Joomla! 1.5 plugin. (updated 3/6/11)

Click here for the Joomla 1.6 plugin

New Features:

- Enable/disable comments in individual articles by adding {showcomments} or {nocomments} to the beginning of article

- Enable/disable comments in certain categories

- Custom ‘Comments Disabled’ text

- Greater control over style

- Enable/disable comments by default

- Improved URL routing