I run a Wordpress blog that gets a moderate amount of traffic compared to my previous ventures. Over time I've grown less and less satisfied with the commenting system though and am looking at replacing it with a 3rd party option.
Right now I've narrowed it down to either Discourse or Disqus (self hosted vs 3rd party hosted). There are pros and cons to each, but the difference that I seem to be stuck on is that Discourse doesn't allow you to create a comment directly on the post. Instead, a user needs to go to the forum and post from there.
While I'm considering other features between the two, I like the idea of self hosting my own content (versus being dependent on a 3rd party). But, leaving the blog to join the conversation breaks my existing flow and seems to be counter to almost all other comment enabled sites.
My question to other community leaders that have used either or better both, did you find users cared about the intermediate step of leaving the blog to go to a forum to comment? If so, and you still went with Discourse, how did the community adapt? Did it impact user engagement?