Finally- More settings for Disqus 2012 in the admin panel, including language support

While there was all of these Disqus problems I wrote about a few days ago, I just noticed this feature in the admin panel. I'm not sure if I caught this zero-day, but at first I thought it was just normal settings from the classic Disqus - but Disqus 2012 was enabled. I know, silly me. Of course, this tutorial/in depth look is about Disqus 2012, so make sure you have your option checked like mine.

Language
Well as mentioned above, language options have finally been added to the admin panel. Previously, the only supported language was English, and there has been comments on the Disqus blog asking for language support, and Tyler as well as some others on the Disqus team said that it was coming in the summer months. While it is approaching the fall, it is still summer, and Disqus has delivered.

Try your best to ignore the other settings in bold, but focus on the Language part. By default, my language is English, and it is English for obvious reasons. There is a lot of languages listed, and you can even help Disqus translate your language by signing up for translation.


Color Scheme
Previously on the Disqus blog somewhere, someone from the Disqus team said that you would be able to manually over ride Disqus' auto color scheme, which loads the appropriate color scheme based on what colors it inherits. If you have been wanting this feature, then you should be happy because you now have it. In most cases, Disqus automatically loads the correct theme. If not, then you can now manually over ride. Disqus wrote about how it determines themes, and you can click here to see that. That page also talks about how Disqus inherits link colors and stuff like that.

Disqus Discovery and Promoted Discovery
If you have not heard of Disqus Discovery, as well as Promoted Discovery, I suggest you take a look at this FAQ article that Disqus made.

Discovery is a way for Disqus to recommend similar conversations to a web page. When users click the suggestion, a sites' analytics collector collects the referral, which is sorta how web pages find out where traffic is exactly coming from

Promoted Discovery is a way for you to make money though Disqus. For those that say tl;dr, Advertisers pay Disqus to add their website to suggestions. They can target specific categories, etc. The promoted discovery is displayed right next to the organic discovery, and you get paid on a pay-per-click basis. Promoted discovery sorta looks like this:

(Promoted) discovery is still being rolled out, so you might not yet see this option in your admin panel yet. If you have Disqus 2012 enabled, then I would believe that this tab will come shortly, if it is not already there. Right now there is a way to turn off Disqus 2012's promoted discovery, but I think there is a bug in the disabling process. When you do uncheck the box, you do get a yellowish warning message. To some folks that are not computer savvy, this can definitely scare them.

Now I'm still not sure myself by what exactly this means. I'm not sure if this actually disables promoted discovery, or discovery all together. I personally think that they should re word this so it sounds more clear. Just my thoughts.

Bug Problem with disabling Promoted Discovery

I do have a bug to report though at the time of this posting and it concerns disabling Promoted Discovery. When you check the box to disable promoted discovery, and then click "save" at the bottom, the box still remains checked when the page is loaded again. At first I thought it was my browser's cache, but I loaded the page from fresh data and it still looks the same. This is why I am being led to believe that this concerns Discovery all together. I'll be reaching out to Disqus on this for comment.

This is a shot of of the discovery tab as I see it. It did have a box showing the picture of the example promoted discovery box and explaining a little snippet about it and linking to the FAQ article.

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My thoughts on Promoted Discovery

Ok, here are my thoughts on promoted discovery. I'm not sure if my comments can be formatted correctly in the Disqus comment box, so I'll just post it here below. Feel free to read or ignore as you wish :)

1. I think that you should bet paid differently - I think that forum mods should get paid for just the mere presence of the links, because the ads are being displayed. I never do quite understand pay per click systems. It takes up space, and it is an ad. You should get paid.
2. You should be able to control how many links are displayed - Forum admins should be able to control exactly how many text links are placed in the discovery box, for example so you can know how much space Promoted Discovery is going to take up. If I am not mistaking, the promoted discovery box is a bit taller than the normal discovery box.

Hope you all enjoyed this in depth look. You can post a comment below.