WebProNews

Tag: Facebook Comments

  • Your Facebook Comments Plugin Is About To Get An Update

    Facebook is getting ready to thrust its new Comments plugin upon users who haven’t taken the initiative to update it themselves. The new plugin was unveiled at the company’s F8 developers conference earlier this year, and comes with some new bells and whistles.

    The most interesting part about the new version is that it syncs comments between content on your website and that same content as shared on your Facebook page.

    Facebook product manager Varun Bhartia said in a blog post:

    This week, we will be updating all previous versions of the Comments Plugin to v2.3 that was announced at F8. This new version includes a refreshed Comments Moderation Tool with new UI, layout, and better spam controls, as well as changes on the Comments front end such as a cleaner design to make the plugin compatible with more sites and optimized for mobile.

    This update will happen automatically, so your app/site will have the benefit of the plugin’s new, updated look and functionality without any work required to make the change.

    You can get a better look at what the new plugin has to offer in our coverage from March.

    You can find the documentation for the plugin here.

    Image via Facebook

  • Should You Use Facebook Comments On Your Site?

    There are a variety of tools websites can use for user comments on blog posts and other content. Facebook has offered an option for years, and there have always been pros and cons of using its solution. The company held its annual f8 developer conference this week, and introduced some changes. There are still pros and cons, but there are new ones to consider.

    Do you use Facebook comments on your site or blog? Why or why not? Tell us about your experience or concerns.

    Facebook launched an update to its Comments plugin with what it calls “a cleaner design to make the plugin compatible with more sites and optimized for mobile.” It also comes with a new moderation tool with better spam filtering.

    The really interesting part, however, is that there’s a new feature that syncs comments between content on your website and that same content as shared on your Facebook page. This particular feature is in beta, but could be the one that truly makes the plugin a better option for business websites.

    “With Comment Mirroring, people can participate in a single conversation, whether comments come from your web page or your Facebook Page,” Facebook explains. “When you share a link from your website to your Facebook page, comments on your webpage will also appear as comments on your Facebook post and vice versa.”

    This could be especially helpful for small businesses who don’t have actual social media managers keeping a close eye on all of their social accounts at all times. It will make engaging in conversations that much easier, and better yet, the whole conversation around the content (or at least a more substantial part of it) will be happening in one place. That adds value to the content. Facebook says the feature will drive higher quality discussions and more comments. It also says the plugin itself leads to higher engagement and time spent on site.

    “We’ve redesigned the comments moderation tool to make it easier and faster for your community management team to moderate multiple comments at once,” the company says. “We’ve also improved our spam detection and filtering with best-in-class detection and automation systems.”

    You can navigate the tool using app-based moderation view or page-based moderation view in the dashboard. You can promote other users to be moderators of your comments, blacklist words, and engage in other general moderation like reviewing, banning, etc.

    To get the plugin, you can find the code generator here.

    In addition to what you get with that, you can change several settings. Here’s what you can do:

    Users can sort through the comments a few different ways, including by social ranking, by newest, and by oldest.

    You can choose which sorting option you want to use as the default, but it naturally defaults to Social Ranking. According to Facebook this uses social signals to surface the highest quality comments first.

    “Comments are ordered to display the most relevant comments from friends and friends of friends as well as the most-liked or active discussion threads,” it says. “Comments marked as spam are hidden from view.”

    If you want to change the default, use the data-order-by attribute and replace “social” with “time” or “reverse_time”.

    You can also adjust the language. More on how to do that here.

    One drawback of the new version of the plugin is that it no longer supports third-party login on comment boxes, so users will have to use their Facebook profiles. This makes sense given the comment mirroring feature, so it’s really only a drawback if you think you’ll miss people not using Facebook to comment, which is certainly a possibility. This could be the main thing that keeps some sites from adopting the plugin as their commenting option.

    The old version of the Comments plugin will stop working on June 23, which is ninety days after the release of Facebook’s Graph API v2.3, which includes the new version. You’ll need to enable the new version of the Facebook SDK for JavaScript or define v2.3 in the data-version attribute of the Comments plugin tag to enable the new version of the plugin. If you don’t manually upgrade before June 23, your implementation of the plugin will do so automatically.

    You can find all the documentation you should need for the new Comments plugin here.

    Do you intend to use the new version of Facebook’s Comments plugin? Let us know what you think about it.

    Images via Facebook

  • Negative Dark Knight Rises Review Enrages Fanboys, Prompts Rotten Tomatoes To Debate Changing Comment System

    On Monday, Hollywood & Fine critic Marshall Fine posted the first negative review of The Dark Knight Rises on Rotten Tomatoes. His grade of “rotten” broke the 100% certified fresh grade that many film lovers wish to see, but rarely ever get.

    Oh, poor Marshall Fine. Although he no doubt knew the wrath he would receive at the hands of fanboys, I’m not sure that he actually realized that some unhappy Batman fans would take up the “It’s simple, we kill the honest critic” plan.

    Within hours, his review had received hundreds of comments on Rotten Tomatoes. And some of them went a bit over the line. Ok, a lot over the line – as some included death threats.

    Here are some snippets from his review that so upset the Nolan army:

    There is very little about “The Dark Knight Rises” that will make you tense, hold you in suspense or cause your adrenaline to squirt. At times, the action is so massive and thunderously clunky that I might as well have been watching one of the “Transformers” movies.

    Part of the problem is the storytelling in the script by Nolan, his brother Jonathan and David Goyer. As in “The Dark Knight,” that urge to operate on a grand scale results only in a grandiosity that, ultimately, becomes a bit silly, even nonsensical.

    There’s already Internet and even wire-service chatter about “The Dark Knight Rises” as the first comic-book movie to be a true Oscar contender. This comes in the wake of the ridiculous outcry when “The Dark Knight” was snubbed for the major awards (with the exception of Ledger) in 2008.

    Premature? Hell, I’d say that anyone forecasting serious Oscar love for this lumpish, tedious film has been smoking too much of that potent, prescription California weed. “The Dark Knight Rises” rarely gets off the ground. It’s certainly not Oscar material.

    Not exactly a glowing review, to say the least. The flood of questionable comments prompted a letter from Rotten Tomatoes’ editor in Chief Matt Atchity titled “The Dark Knight Rises – This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things.”

    “If a critic often goes against the majority, but has well-reasoned arguments, it’s unlikely we’re going to ban them, at least not just for having a different opinion. We’re not looking for groupthink here,” he said. “We’ll ban you for threats and hate speech — we’re trying to have fun here, so don’t be a dick. And don’t try and argue about your right to free speech — this is a business, and we have the right to refuse service to anyone we feel like.”

    Atchity also said that due to this latest outburst, Rotten Tomatoes may be moving to Facebook-connected commenting system, which will force commenters to log in and therefore lose any sense of anonymity.

    Fine’s “rottten” review was the first, but as of now not the only negative review for the film. Critics like Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune have weighed in with their not-so-flattering words about the film. His review has had comments disabled.

  • Facebook Comments On Your Site May Show Up in Google Results

    You know that Facebook comments plugin that lets people comment on your content using their Facebook profiles? Apparently Google is indexing those comments on your site now.

    Digital Inspiration illustrates just that (hat tip to Greg Finn). It makes sense, given Google’s continued push toward putting more emphasis on who you are, when it’s delivering search results.

    We’ve heard that Google is likely to launch a Google+-based comments system similar to the Facebook plugin, and it stands to reason that comments from that would appear in search results as well.

    Facebook Comments

    There’s been plenty of debate over the pros and cons of even having comments. Even a Google engineer was recently quoted as saying comments could dilute the quality score o fa page by diluting its overall keyword density.

    Still, with Google is even putting Google+ comments on search results on its own.

    Last week, Facebook launched a “subscribe” link for its comments plugin, allowing users to follow commenters right from there.

    Subscribe from comments

    One positive, on the search side of things, about Facebook’s comments plugin, is that Facebook users are generally real identities, which can help comments to be less spammy, as the profiles are associated with real people, as opposed to anonymous beings.

  • Facebook Comments Plugin Added to 50,000 Sites In a Month, Updates Launched

    Facebook Comments Plugin Added to 50,000 Sites In a Month, Updates Launched

    At the beginning of March, Facebook launched its new and improved comments plugin for content sites. It brought features like the use of social signals to order comments based on quality, improved moderation tools, the ability to add different log-in options, and better sharing of comments. Apparently a lot of sites have been using it.

    “In a little over one month, more than 50,000 websites have added the updated Facebook Comments Box plugin to add social context and authenticity to their commenting systems,” a Facebook representative tells WebProNews.

    Today, Facebook has launched some updates to the plugin. Facebook says the new features are based on developer feedback to “enhance the experience for both website owners and users.”

    These include a permalink to specific stories, an API to pull comments, Bigger News Feed stories, a new color scheme option aimed at dark-colored sites, and the addition of Hotmail as a login option.

    With the permalinks, users can access specific comments by clicking the timestamp, not unlike accessing status updates on Facebook itself. Notifications will also be tied to the permalink.

    With the API, comments can be searched and exported. This way, developers and site owners can “highlight the most interesting comments, perform analysis on the comment stream, reward top commenters, search through existing comments, and use comments to improve SEO on their site,” Facebook says.

    “News Feed stories generated by Comments activity can now have greater social context, which can increase the click-through-rate (CTR) back to the original site and encourage people on Facebook to contribute to the discussion,” the company adds.

    With Hotmail as a new login option, simply showing that Facebook is open to adding more options, the plugin may be more attractive to more users. Publishers want to give readers as many options as possible. Something tells me we won’t see Google on the list of options anytime soon though. Now, they have Hotmail, Yahoo, and AOL as third-party options.