Redesign: Ditching Disqus
24 January 2020 | 8th Edition
Call me a cheapskate but I'm not paying $xx for the privilege of hiding low-rent random adverts that Disqus, the third-party commenting system, insists on littering a website with.
Don't get me wrong, back in the day Disqus ruled. The ability to add a commenting system on a site not powered by WordPress or other similar platform is a challenge, unless you know your way around some serious JavaScript and database coding. And I don't. Disqus was the ideal solution. It looked ok and could within broad boundaries be made to look like part of the hosting site. It had an easy to use moderation system. You could build a good network of social contacts through it.
But then came monetisation. Having built a large user-base of dedicated customers, all of a sudden ads appeared. Low rent ads at that. "But you can turn them off for $xx". Wow thank you. Having helped build your business for you purely through deploying it and allowing people to comment, please don't then tell me I need to pay something to sweep away the cruft.
Purely on that basis I'm thinking that Disqus is going. I'm not convinced that it was used by commenters to the extent that it could've been anyway. Commenting was never really the name of the game here. But feedback is good and is wanted. So I'll need a new way for you to tell me that I'm rubbish and to go away. With that in mind I'm going to use a swearword for some: Facebook. Most people are on it, so it seems a sensible platform for off-site commenting. So the outcome might be to add an FB button at the end of each page, this will be something to experiment with.
As an aside, it will also speed page loading times through not loading yet another 3rd party script or relying on dependencies from another server.
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