"When considering commenting systems there's always a balance between the easy of administration of these third party services and the value of your network. Here are some thoughts: 1) As a user I find that I'm more likely to comment on sites that use disqus / facebook comments /etc. If the site requires that I maintain yet another set of credentials, I'm less likely to comment on it. So, at least for people like me, 3rd party comments increases the community of your site. 2) As a drupal developer there's another thing to consider.... if you are using a third party commenting system you can cache your site more aggressively. Since all the users would be anonymous and the comments are being loaded via Javascript you can optimize the heck out of your site using tools like boost in order to serve your content with less server load. I have sites that cache older content for weeks. For sites that run in a constrained environment or who are likely to have traffic spikes this might make a..." - Sean Reiser