One of the great things about Disqus is that you can use it on a “static” blog. My blog (the one hosting this article) is just GitHub pages with posts written in markdown. This has the advantage of being simple and free (and easily to cache/distribute on CDN etc.) but has drawbacks of not being able to have custom code like that.
When my blog was hosted on AppEngine I had self-hosted comments; but Disqus seemed like a much better option. Not so sure about that now though!
I’ve gone back and forth on that, but the solution my current blog is a note at the bottom of each post saying:
Comments welcome: mjn@anadrome.org
This outsources the infrastructure to email, which already works, with the obvious drawback that the barrier for many people to emailing someone is higher than that for posting a comment. Although that might not be purely a drawback. :-) Another difference of course is that email is private, while some comments might be interesting to other readers, too. I partly remedy that by occasionally posting (attributed) updates at the bottom of a post if someone sends in something I think might be interesting for other readers, as in this example.
Besides not wanting to mess with running either a first- or third-party commenting system, the other motivation is that on a personal blog I feel some desire to keep it as a place for my own writing, not as a general third-party discussion forum attached to every page. So if someone sends in relevant comment I’m happy to post it (or a paraphrase), but I don’t necessarily want comments from random people arguing about tangents to be posted underneath my essays.
I’ve thought about not having comments directly (esp. when HN/Reddit/here usually get more comments than directly on the blog), but I do still think they add value. Not only do I get “Thanks!” now and then which lets me know people are finding my posts useful, but there’s often good discussion between people there.
I don’t get a lot of bad comments, so the only reason to remove them would be to get rid of the scripts but I think (hope) Disqus cares enough about its reputation that they’ll fix this and be more careful in future.
The discussion between commenters on one thread can lead to discovery of new ideas for those people or blog author. That’s essentially what happens here, on HN, etc. Doesn’t happen with email since the readers don’t know of each others' presence much less interesting comments.
Can vouch for isso for static sites; I have been using it myself for years on my blog - but alas I don’t get the traffic to generate any comments anyway. The only JavaScript on there is isso and Google Analytics.
Oh, based on the above I figured this was self-install and wouldn’t work for static sites. If it can be used directly from their site though, there’s nothing to stop them making the same mistake in the future? =D
I’m doing the same thing. I have static Jekyll blog, although now on Netlify rather than GitHub Pages because then I can use https with my custom domain.
It uses WebMention (which btw now is a W3C Proposed Recommendation), which removes the need for embedding any authentication mechanisms like Facebook. Instead everyone writes the comments on their own blogs instead and pings my service which then retrieves the comment. I then use a javascript that looks for links to comment pages within my blog and embeds any comments (and any new comments in realtime) inline through basic progressive enhancement (and thus it’s all easily curlable despite the javascriptiness)
And there’s other similar services that one can easily self-host. There’s even people who do automatic commits to their static page of any received comments, both from WebMention and through comments form. Been thinking of eventually experimenting with that as well and make my WebMention endpoint talk to my Micropub endpoint (another standard that’s now going through W3C) to submit any received mentions: https://github.com/voxpelli/webpage-micropub-to-github Some are already doing that with their respective endpoints.
I have static Jekyll blog, although now on Netlify rather than GitHub Pages because then I can use https with my custom domain.
My blog (hosting this article) is actually custom domain over SSL on GitHub pages (using CloudFlare to add the SSL). It’s not ideal, but was easy to add to the existing GitHub Pages site rather than migrating!
It uses WebMention (which btw now is a W3C Proposed Recommendation), which removes the need for embedding any authentication mechanisms like Facebook. Instead everyone writes the comments on their own blogs instead and pings my service which then retrieves the comment.
I’d never heard of this, this sounds really interesting - I shall have to read up! Thanks! :-)
Well, just added “.disquscdn.com” and “.disqus.com” to my uBlock filter list.
Somewhat ironic that the site announcing this is itself using Disqus, but it made testing the filter convenient. Also makes the page load significantly faster.
I’m not sure how it will turn out, but it was the best option I could find.
I researched way too many options – it’s weird how broken blog commenting is. I tried out Disqus and noticed the bloat and the Facebook hit and said “nope”.
Ideally I would be able to run a blog comment script as FastCGI on shared hosting (Dreamhost). Most comment applications were assuming you have a VPS, which I don’t want to manage just for blog comments.
An alternative to Disqus is Isso, which is self-hosted.
[Comment removed by author]
I’ll probably add this to my blog so you all can be mean to me for a change. Good find @hga.
I use Isso on my blog and I absolutely love it.
Shameless plug: I wrote an openshift catridge(?) which makes installation of Isso in just one click - link
I wonder if it has any spam protection features, I can see administrative features but not auto-spam rule features
One of the great things about Disqus is that you can use it on a “static” blog. My blog (the one hosting this article) is just GitHub pages with posts written in markdown. This has the advantage of being simple and free (and easily to cache/distribute on CDN etc.) but has drawbacks of not being able to have custom code like that.
When my blog was hosted on AppEngine I had self-hosted comments; but Disqus seemed like a much better option. Not so sure about that now though!
I’ve gone back and forth on that, but the solution my current blog is a note at the bottom of each post saying:
This outsources the infrastructure to email, which already works, with the obvious drawback that the barrier for many people to emailing someone is higher than that for posting a comment. Although that might not be purely a drawback. :-) Another difference of course is that email is private, while some comments might be interesting to other readers, too. I partly remedy that by occasionally posting (attributed) updates at the bottom of a post if someone sends in something I think might be interesting for other readers, as in this example.
Besides not wanting to mess with running either a first- or third-party commenting system, the other motivation is that on a personal blog I feel some desire to keep it as a place for my own writing, not as a general third-party discussion forum attached to every page. So if someone sends in relevant comment I’m happy to post it (or a paraphrase), but I don’t necessarily want comments from random people arguing about tangents to be posted underneath my essays.
I’ve thought about not having comments directly (esp. when HN/Reddit/here usually get more comments than directly on the blog), but I do still think they add value. Not only do I get “Thanks!” now and then which lets me know people are finding my posts useful, but there’s often good discussion between people there.
I don’t get a lot of bad comments, so the only reason to remove them would be to get rid of the scripts but I think (hope) Disqus cares enough about its reputation that they’ll fix this and be more careful in future.
The discussion between commenters on one thread can lead to discovery of new ideas for those people or blog author. That’s essentially what happens here, on HN, etc. Doesn’t happen with email since the readers don’t know of each others' presence much less interesting comments.
Can vouch for isso for static sites; I have been using it myself for years on my blog - but alas I don’t get the traffic to generate any comments anyway. The only JavaScript on there is isso and Google Analytics.
Oh, based on the above I figured this was self-install and wouldn’t work for static sites. If it can be used directly from their site though, there’s nothing to stop them making the same mistake in the future? =D
I’m doing the same thing. I have static Jekyll blog, although now on Netlify rather than GitHub Pages because then I can use https with my custom domain.
I built and hosted my own IndieWeb Disqus alternative though. And it’s open for others to use: https://webmention.herokuapp.com/
It uses WebMention (which btw now is a W3C Proposed Recommendation), which removes the need for embedding any authentication mechanisms like Facebook. Instead everyone writes the comments on their own blogs instead and pings my service which then retrieves the comment. I then use a javascript that looks for links to comment pages within my blog and embeds any comments (and any new comments in realtime) inline through basic progressive enhancement (and thus it’s all easily curlable despite the javascriptiness)
And there’s other similar services that one can easily self-host. There’s even people who do automatic commits to their static page of any received comments, both from WebMention and through comments form. Been thinking of eventually experimenting with that as well and make my WebMention endpoint talk to my Micropub endpoint (another standard that’s now going through W3C) to submit any received mentions: https://github.com/voxpelli/webpage-micropub-to-github Some are already doing that with their respective endpoints.
My blog (hosting this article) is actually custom domain over SSL on GitHub pages (using CloudFlare to add the SSL). It’s not ideal, but was easy to add to the existing GitHub Pages site rather than migrating!
I’d never heard of this, this sounds really interesting - I shall have to read up! Thanks! :-)
Well, just added “.disquscdn.com” and “.disqus.com” to my uBlock filter list.
Somewhat ironic that the site announcing this is itself using Disqus, but it made testing the filter convenient. Also makes the page load significantly faster.
I had this problem a week ago and decided to use Reddit for my blog comments: http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2016/12/29.html
I’m not sure how it will turn out, but it was the best option I could find.
I researched way too many options – it’s weird how broken blog commenting is. I tried out Disqus and noticed the bloat and the Facebook hit and said “nope”.
Ideally I would be able to run a blog comment script as FastCGI on shared hosting (Dreamhost). Most comment applications were assuming you have a VPS, which I don’t want to manage just for blog comments.