Adobe just announced that the Livefyre comments plugin will be shutting down beginning this week, with final closure coming mid winter.
Here is what you need to know about moving away from Livefyre
Your conversations on existing posts will continue to render until early February of 2017, but starting immediately (October 20) users that do not already have a Livefyre account will not be able to create one and comment on your site. Then, come March you will lose all Liveyfyre comments immediately.
Step One: Get your data back
Update – October 21, 2016
Adobe has just announced that a proper Livefyre > WordPress migration tool will be made available by November 30th. Cheers to them for making that happen.
If you have been running Livefyre on your site (this doesn’t apply to any Postmatic customers, btw) the first thing you’ll need to do is to get your comments off of their server, and on to your own. The Livefyre plugin should be copying comments back to your WordPress database already. If it is not, you need to reach out to their support immediately and request and export.
The limitations of the comments you’ll get back
This is where the tragedy begins: the comments which Livefyre does send back to your site are less than stellar. There are two problems with the data:
Livefyre will not give you the email addresses of your commenters. This is a huge loss for your email marketing efforts and also means WordPress will not be able to generate Gravatars for your commenters. Moving forward your comments will display on your site, but you will not have profile images, which makes for a rather boring comment area.You will lose your comment hierarchy. This is the biggie. Livefyre will release your comments in a flat list, rather than with replies/nesting in tact. This is going to make the conversation hard to follow on your old posts, but at least your data is there to continue giving you an SEO bump.
Step Two: Build an awesome comment system for free, using native WordPress commenting
Hopefully this will be the final time in which the case needs to be made that third-party comment systems are nothing but trouble. Managing comments inside WordPress can be so easy. Plus, you’re not selling your user data to advertisers and what is yours stays yours. As it should be.
This is all you need to build a fantastic comment section on your WordPress site
For the comment form and comment display:
- Epoch or WpDiscuz
Each of these free plugins supercharges your comment form and how your comments display. Maybe you were using Livefyre because the comment template in your theme was ugly and slow. Both of these fix that handily
For spam and comment moderation:
- Akismet – The free and awesome standard for detecting spambots. Indispensable.
- WpBruiser – A great addition to Akismet to help with detecting bots on the front end and managing trackback spam as well. Thank us later.
- Crowd Control – Our little plugin that lets your users report inappropriate comments and automatically send them back to moderation. Take a vacation and let your readers take care of the site.
- Postmatic – Paid Postmatic plans offer the ability to moderate comments via email, from wherever you are. It’s a fantastic way to make keep your guest authors in the loop on conversations on their posts, while also making them responsible for moderating their own comments (all without leaving their inbox or logging into WordPress)
- Sift Ninja – A new service that is currently in beta – Sift Ninja provides invaluable control over trolls. It filters comments for Bullying, Racism, Violence, Sexting, or PII (Personally Identifiable Information ). Keep an eye on these guys. They are making wonderful stuff.
For comment subscriptions and higher engagement rates
Postmatic Basic – Postmatic lets your readers stay in the loop by receiving smart email notices of followup comments and replies. Features include smart throttling and batching of new comments so nobody gets too much email – and of course the ability to respond to comments simply by hitting reply from within their inbox. Awesome.
Step Three: Stay tuned
We hope to release some of our own tools to clean up those exported Livefyre comments very soon, as well as writing more detailed migration guides. Keep in the loop by subscribing to our blog using the box below.