If you’re run­ning a phpLD direc­tory script, you prob­a­bly know that its com­ment sys­tem leaves a lot to be desired. You can’t edit com­ments for one. You can only approve or delete com­ments. There is also very lit­tle spam pro­tec­tion. You can require users to reg­is­ter before leav­ing com­ments to min­i­mize spam, but doing this would also min­i­mize the com­ments itself. In this day and age of social media, there’s not going to be a whole lot of peo­ple will­ing to take the time to reg­is­ter and  login just so they can leave a cou­ple of lines.

For­tu­nately though, there are free com­ment­ing sys­tems out there that you could use on your direc­tory or any web­site for that mat­ter. E.g. Intense Debate and Dis­qus

I chose to imple­ment Dis­qus on my direc­to­ries.  If you want to see it in action, you can see it here and here.

If you are dis­sat­is­fied with the cur­rent com­ment­ing sys­tem on your direc­tory or web­site, here’s why you really should give Dis­qus a try.

• Dis­qus allows you to man­age com­ments for ALL your web­sites in one place.
• Dis­qus allows you to reply to com­ments via email
• Dis­qus uses Akismet to fil­ter comments
• Finally, Dis­cuss allows your users to option­ally log in using their Face­book, Twit­ter, OpenID, and their Yahoo cre­den­tials allow­ing your users to eas­ily spread the dis­cus­sion all across the social web.

Imple­ment­ing Dis­qus on your web­site is easy. Just signup for their ser­vice, fill in your web­site infor­ma­tion, and fol­low the spe­cific instruc­tion for your plat­form. For exam­ple, for a self-hosted Word­Press blog, you will need to install Dis­qus’ Word­Press plu­gin.

For phpLD, you’ll need to copy Disqus’  generic JavaScript code and paste it where ever you want to place their com­ment form.

If you want to install the com­ment form on the detail pages of your links, edit your detail.tpl file and paste the JavaScript code there. phpLD uses the Smarty tem­plate sys­tem so make sure that you enclose the JavaScript code with a {lit­eral} tag. This will allow your JavaScript code to be taken “literally”.

For exam­ple,

{literal}
YOUR JavaScript CODE HERE
{/literal}


Also, you prob­a­bly don’t want to con­fuse your users with two com­ment form sys­tems so make sure you dis­able phpLD’s com­ment sub­mis­sion in its admin panel.