There are several preferred strategies in marketing and SEO techniques, but guest posting is at the top of the list of every specialist. It’s considered to be one of the most effective ways to grow a backlink portfolio and acquire new members. As a community we would like to increase our visibility and guest posting is one of the best tools to achieve it. It’s also very important to provide our community a means to give us a feedback which is important to improve ICZ’s quality.
While searching the best plugin for us, we stumbled on wpDiscuz 7, which advertised to be GDPR compliant. While GDPR was our prime focus, after quick look we discovered that wpDiscuz 7 will fulfill our requirements by providing full data management subsystem.
Regarding GDPR, wpDiscuz 7 covers:
- the right to be informed about the collection and use of the personal data,
- the right to access the personal data and supplementary information,
- the right to be forgotten – under Article 17 of the GDPR individuals have the right to have personal data erased,
- the right to obtain from the controller restriction of processing – under Article 18,
- the right to data portability – it’s a right to obtain and reuse personal data for own purposes across different services,
- the rights related to automated decision making including profiling – profiling can be part of an automated decision-making process for example while using social media buttons to login,
- usage of cookies to provide functionality and to recognize website commenters across different devices.
Good approach to data management was our prime intention, but the design and user experience is equally important. That was the second, but very important aspect of the add-on.
Currently with wpDiscuz 7 you have three layouts to choose from. To be honest we had an issue to decide which one is better.
In our opinion it has all of the elements well organized and available whenever needed. What is more, with this add-on users have a quick overview of comments and overall rating of the article instead of ratings presented next to the comment. This approach is much more intuitive and allows to rate the article without need of commenting.
Broken wpDiscuz
wpDiscuz 7, in our opinion, has a clear design that attracts users to leave a comment. Nevertheless, there are always pros and cons. This time, it took us longer to review a product because we approached some issues in the middle of tests. In the beginning, we used Hueman Pro Theme, which was simple in design and quite good for people who just started creating websites. Unfortunately, in a short time, we discovered that the functionality of wpDiscuz doesn’t work properly with that Theme. Use of the inline commenting, which is an exciting option, doesn’t work with some themes—that why we had to use a regular WordPress container for the text instead of the Nimble elements. This way, we would have to break our design and mix elements on the website. As you might know, it’s not a good idea to mix different techniques and elements, so we were not happy.
After having problems with Hueman Pro performance, we decided to change the theme to DIVI and test the new one.
DIVI is a straightforward theme to work with initially, but we reached problems with wpDiscuz and a new theme. This time, it’s not a small problem. With DIVI, wpDiscuz doesn’t want to work at all. The whole plugin gets scrambled, and nothing is displayed as supposed to be.
Missing call to action icon
As we thought – it looked too beautiful to be true. The nicest element of the plugin that we like doesn’t work in the DIVI theme. First of all, after activating wpDiscuz 7, we noticed a lack of proper CSS styling. We believe that there are open HTML elements blocking design.
