Make the enterprise "remote commenting" feature standard

[Shariq Ansari]

• Feature is described at https://invisioncommunity.com/services/remote-commenting
• This functionality is free & easy to implement... with Disqus AND Facebook comments plugins!
• ...but costs extra $$$ for IPS customers to implement using the IPS platform... 😕
• Given that the primary competition for this product is both free AND discourages use of IPS, I think this "enterprise" feature should be democratized and made free/standard as well
• Would become a selling point for anyone with a site that exists outside of IPS (i.e. not implemented in Pages) that uses IPS as their community
• Would become a first-class working example of REST API for developers to learn from (assuming it used REST API - which it should!)

[Aiwa]

I see it as an enterprise feature because it requires customization, always, brand matching I believe is the buzz word. 

There is no one-size-fits-all remote commenting system. They'll always need to be styled to match the site they are integrating with. Something that takes time. So you'll have to pay someone for that anyway. 

The REST API does give you most of the tools to do this. 

You can't blame IPS for pull through marketing here. 

[Morgin]

I would love this. I think it’s a way for traditional forums to take back some ground from Facebook for smaller businesses that want the ability for customers to engage with content (be it products in a commerce store, pages, etc) without needing to load the full forums. Facebook/disqus are eating everyone’s lunch with threaded comment chains on content. This would be a huge value add for the platform as a whole. 

[TheWorldNewsMedia.org]

This would help my community grow.... although I think it is too late now...

About 3-4 years too late now.

You would think IPS would want this commenting system being seen all over the web instead of limiting its implementation.

The customization must be too laborious for the benefit?

[Joel R]

Dumb question, and correct me if I'm wrong.  

But based on my understanding, isn't remote commenting limited to ONE license? Meaning, you can have remote commenting on twenty websites and your Invision Community that you own, but user comments are tied to that one license.  Another license will have a totally separate set of remote commenting.  

This is different from Disqus which is "universal" conversation -- any website can embed Disqus conversation and users carry their profile across the web.  

[bfarber]

I'm not intimately familiar with how Disqus works (especially from a licensing and technology standpoint).

Our remote commenting solution allows you to effectively create a "comments" area on an external page. Most of the time clients using this approach do so for custom made blog/article style areas on their site where they don't already support commenting built in to whatever software they are using.

 

[Shariq Ansari]

On 1/15/2019 at 10:19 AM, bfarber said:

I'm not intimately familiar with how Disqus works (especially from a licensing and technology standpoint).

Our remote commenting solution allows you to effectively create a "comments" area on an external page. Most of the time clients using this approach do so for custom made blog/article style areas on their site where they don't already support commenting built in to whatever software they are using.

 

@bfarber Precisely; the case I'm making is that you don't really *want* ANY of your customers using Disqus/FB for this when they COULD be using IPS suite instead. From a "lock-in" perspective, it gets valuable data into IPS instead of having it sit with a third-party, further consolidating the investment in IPS for customers with pages on their site that sit outside the IPS framework.

I'm proposing that this be a standard feature, leveraging the REST API.... customization to fit a site's visual look & feel could (and should) remain an enterprise offering, but the core of it would be a drop-in script, available to all licensed IPS users, which makes the product far more flexible and lets it play nice with custom databases in Django, Laravel, etc. There are probably a handful of potential customers with existing database-driven sites for whom this would be a big selling point. Not a ton, but some.

On 1/14/2019 at 7:15 PM, Joel R said:

Dumb question, and correct me if I'm wrong.  

But based on my understanding, isn't remote commenting limited to ONE license? Meaning, you can have remote commenting on twenty websites and your Invision Community that you own, but user comments are tied to that one license.  Another license will have a totally separate set of remote commenting.  

This is different from Disqus which is "universal" conversation -- any website can embed Disqus conversation and users carry their profile across the web.  

@Joel R This is accurate, but the use case I have - and which clearly some enterprise customers have had as well - involves comments on the same site, or at least surrounding the same content. I'm not looking for a universal solution, I'm looking to leverage the solution I already have

On 12/10/2018 at 11:44 PM, Aiwa said:

I see it as an enterprise feature because it requires customization, always, brand matching I believe is the buzz word. 

There is no one-size-fits-all remote commenting system. They'll always need to be styled to match the site they are integrating with. Something that takes time. So you'll have to pay someone for that anyway. 

The REST API does give you most of the tools to do this. 

You can't blame IPS for pull through marketing here. 

@Aiwa Plain, semantic HTML5 would be fine; I agree that the REST API offers most of the tools necessary, which is why I think the "last mile" to provide a drop-in JS that adds the comments could be straightforward and provide a lot of value. I suppose there's always the possibility of a marketplace addon, or commissioning something similar, but given that IPS *already* offers this to enterprise customers, and given that IPS has a vested interest in its customers leaning on the IPS suite for comments (instead of Facebook, Disqus, etc.), it seems like a win-win for everyone.

[Jordan Miller]

I am 100% in agreeance  heh. I would LOVEEEEE for some way my forum users could comment on the news stories we post in Wordpress. It would be mutually beneficial for the news part of our site and forum because it'd increase engagement. It would get the forum users to read the news posts, and conversely the people who read the news posts may want to comment. We use Disqus and I hate it.