I recently had the problem that I wanted to re-import some comments that I had made some (minor) changes to into the Disqus system using the Disqus Comment System plugin ^[1]. Well, just bluntly hitting the “Export Comments” button in the Advanced Options didn’t help… the changed comments were not imported and remained in their unchanged form.

In order to find out how to proceed, I sent an email to the help desk and got the following response from Ryan (quoting):

Hi Marco,

In this case the best way to do this is to delete your site shortname in Disqus and create a new one to start over. If you have any trouble with removing it, shoot me your shortname and registered email address in a new email message.

Thanks,
Ryan (end of quote)

Well, actually, it wasn’t that easy. Here is what happened:

• I deleted the site and all comments from Disqus using the “Delete site and comments” button at the bottom of the “Settings -> General” page.
• Next, I registered the same site again.
• Clicking the “Export Comments” button using the WordPress plugin lead to the “Sorry, something went wrong…” message. Disabling and enabling the plugin again did not make a change – exporting the comments wouldn’t work.
• I had a hunch that it might have had to do with the Disqus API key that you can get at disqus.com/api/get_my_key/ ^[2] (as described here ^[3]). So I disabled the plugin, deleted some lines from the WordPress database (see below) and enabled the plugin again – and it started as if it was installed for the first time, retrieving the correct API key (just changing the API key directly within the WordPress database didn’t help).
• After that, the “Export Comments” button worked perfectly.

Here is the SQL statement you need to find the lines within the WordPress database:

SELECT  *
FROM  `wp_options`
WHERE  `option_name`  LIKE  '%disqus%'

Problems with Facebook Connect

After “re-installing” the plugin, I had to fill in the “Facebook Connect” API key. Since I did not know where to get it from, I tried “(Click here to get one)” on the “Settings -> General” page within Disqus, but Disqus just could not finish the retrieval. Then I found this article ^[4] which describes how to retrieve your API key from Facebook by using this link: www.facebook.com/developers/apps.php ^[5].

I was surprised to see at least 10 entries referring to Disqus. As is seems, the connection worked in the first place to create a new API key, but it could not be completed for Disqus.

Everything is fine now… I deleted all entries but one and used the API key from the remaining one.

Sometimes, it’s a rocky road to find the solution – but persistence is not (always) futile.