Discourse has a simple user trust system that makes moderating the forum a lot easier. Users gain more permissions as they gain more trust, which limits the amount of damage spammers and trolls can do. Discourse co-founder Jeff Atwood also founded StackExchange, which is the gold standard for gamification/moderation systems so you can also expect Discourse to get better and better at moderation.
The community really doesn't seem to care all that much about providing a working import system, even for major competitors like Xenforo. It's pretty much a "pay us (thousands of dollars) to import your community or go use something else" type of culture.
The best feature is its design: discourse is designed to aid in the creation of high quality online conversations. Flat discussions with well implemented quoting systems, expandable/collapsible replies, infinite scroll, clean UI and many more features come together to form a highly polished forum experience that makes legacy forums show their age.
You can host it yourself in a $5 cloud server or on any Linux server you already have. And if you don't want to deal with this, you can use the hosting platform from the development team.
The Disqus design is minimalist and is broken down into three tabs - discussion, community and My Disqus.
The discussion interface provides the usual elements, but with unique features like visual indicators of live actions, such as new replies and even when another user is typing. It's possible to sort discussion by new, old and best.
The community tab is designed to help connect commenters together to form a network that keeps them coming back. It is also a great source of traffic from external sites.
My Disqus helps users quickly keep track of activities in their network as well as manage notifications.
Social Tagging is another way Livefyre leverages social networks to pull in discussions to a blog. Instead of sharing the URL to a DM on twitter or a message on facebook, it's possible to tag a friend to get involved to the article right within the comment.
SocialSync syncs conversations happening on twitter and facebook to those left on a blog post. The synced comments behave like normal comments, and will also post replies, etc back to Facebook and Twitter.
This solves a big problem of bringing existing discussions to the post and is not available on competing products.
Livefyre doesn't do anything to prevent from customizing the css styles of the comments. It's possible to have the embedded comments match the look and feel of any site.
The LiveFyre interface allows:
Sorting comments in ascending or descending order
Tagging an individual user in a comment
Following the conversation to receive updates
Sharing individual comments
Nesting replies
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