Disqus is a very nice tool to handle comments better and probably I will add it here soon, but I’ve notice a big issue with the import of the old comments already inserted on posts. I’ve had trouble with a blog with 5 thousands comments on old posts.
The problem is in the automatic tool that imports, via ajax, the comments by examining the posts one by one, from the first post of the blog. You can find that tool in the Disqus plugin settings page after the “Advanced” paragraph, named “Import and export”:
Press “Export comments” (export from wordpress and import in disqus) to bring the comments into your Disqus. It’s an ajax tool, so you must not close the page or click on anything. It has to go on till the end:
In my case the import happens to fail always after some minutes, propbably it depends on session time or connection problems… When it stops you can restart the export everytime you want (it will not create duplicates). The export will restart the process from the first post.
Starting everytime from the first post was made to handle re-export process in case of failure, I understand it, but if you have many posts and many comments this process will never end. So, if you have many posts, during the export take note of the id of the last post examined (in the above jpg: #24828), then open the plugin script placed in /wp-content/plugins/disqus-comment-system/disqus.php and go at lines near 430. As you can see there is the query that extract the next post to examin:
SELECT * FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_type != 'revision' AND post_status = 'publish' AND comment_count > 0 AND ID > %d ORDER BY ID ASC LIMIT 1
The %d parameter is the id of the last post examined (#24828 in the above jpg) passed from javascript to the plugin. When the process fails and you restart it, it always get the first post… so, you can trick it changing the query and adding just “AND ID > 24828“:
SELECT * FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_type != 'revision' AND post_status = 'publish' AND comment_count > 0 AND ID > %d AND ID > 24828 ORDER BY ID ASC LIMIT 1
So it will start where it has stopped. It’s a kind of “resume” process.
This was the only way I’ve found to export 5.000 comments from wordpress to disqus.
I’ve also noticed that the old count of number of comments at the beginning of the post was wrong, and I’ve found that it is due to conflicts with my template.
Luckly there is a checkbox to check to handle this problem and fix the number of comments shown on wordpress using Disqus:
