There can be more than one.

A recent addi­tion to the Jet­pack “mega-plugin” is a fea­ture that WordPress.com users have enjoyed for over a year  — the abil­ity for Face­book, Twit­ter, and WordPress.com users to authen­ti­cate in the com­ment form and use that iden­tity to leave a com­ment. Native users (in our case, Prince­ton netID users) can still use that iden­tity to comment.

Active WordPress.com users, may remem­ber this com­ment system’s code name, High­lander Com­ments. There can be only more than one?

Other com­ment plu­g­ins offer mul­ti­ple authen­ti­ca­tion options, namely Dis­qus and IntenseDe­bate; how­ever, those sys­tems store the com­ments on exter­nal servers, and the JavaScript to load those com­ments can be a bit slow. The Jet­pack Com­ments fea­ture just builds off of the native Word­Press com­ment system.

Jet­pack Com­ments acti­va­tion button

We will be enabling Jet­pack Com­ments for all new sites on our net­work. Admin­is­tra­tors for exist­ing sites will have to go into the Jet­pack area of the Word­Press admin inter­face and click the blue “Acti­vate” but­ton. If the default Word­Press com­ment sys­tem is pre­ferred, site admins can deac­ti­vate that fea­ture on the same admin page.

For more infor­ma­tion about Jet­pack Com­ments, check out the doc­u­men­ta­tion on Jetpack.me.