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Switching to Disqus

2017/03/22 11:32 AM

A helpful reader emailed me to point out that the comment system was subtly broken, and rather than try to fix a miasma of duct tape and paperclips once again I decided to switch to Disqus.

Currently the legacy comment system isn’t visible but don’t worry, the comments still exist! I’m working on writing an importer to get the old comments over to the new system. The comments have all been imported. It isn’t great but they’re there.

Meanwhile, Disqus gives a few advantages. It has pretty decent spam filtering, anyone can upvote/downvote comments, and you can stalk follow fellow commenters on other Disqus-enabled sites! (If you do not want to be followed in this way it is easy enough to disable your public profile on your Disqus settings.) There’s also some nice comment reply notification stuff that lets you know about goings-on across whatever sites you use that also use Disqus.

I’m not a huge fan of handing all this data over to third parties, but keep in mind that all the comments were being indexed/stored by Google et al anyway, and Disqus has been around for a while and has shown themselves to be at least reasonably trustworthy as far as pervasive Internet things go. The only thing I really dislike is the requirement to use Javascript and that’s kind of unavoidable these days.

Anyway, the other option was to remove comments entirely and I figure that’s a last-resort measure.