You should sit down before reading this.
Despite what seemed like a heartening tide against services like Disqus, they’re enjoying a baffling resurgence. I asked myself, why would people voluntarily make their sites slower, more convoluted for security conscious people to use, as well as less accessible, searchable, cohesive, secure and predictable? I did a bit of digging, and discovered something shocking.
Crab people. They taste like crab, talk like people, and they live underground.
Crab people are installing third party comment systems on as many blogs as they can by convincing people they’re shiny and awesome. Once installed on a critical mass, they’ll be able to control the blogs remotely using an undisclosed back door in the proprietary code and take back the world the Humans so cruelly stole from them.
Crab people! Crab people! Taste like crab! Comment like people!
Somewhat related posts
- 2010.03.09 The greatest CD cover of all time?
- 2009.09.20 Don’t use JavaScript to compose pages
- 2007.08.09 The Adobe Flash of the comments world
Would you be more likely to comment on my site if I didn’t use disqus?
I like it because it aggregates my comments from the sites that use it, and makes commenting a much more enjoyable experience for me. Currently if I leave a comment here or on Taciturnly.com for instance, I need to re-check periodically to see if anyone has responded, whereas disqus tells me when someone else is responding to the thread.
And it’s much better at integrating with a site now than it used to be – if JS is off on my site you should still see all the comments people have left, and Google sees every comment left. As to your other concerns:
cohesive: I think it fits my sites better than the native comment styles that people have come up with.
secure: is it that JS is insecure? I’m not sure how my self-hosted wordpress site is made less secure by it.
predictable: I think the sites that use it are MORE predictable, as you know how it works every site you visit.
Plus it lets users choose how they wish to connect/authenticate, whether via Twitter, Facebook or Disqus itself.
Don’t think I won’t ditch it in a second if I thought more people might comment if I left it off, or if it’s found to be responsible for doomsday in 2012, but till then I’m mostly happy with it – it replaces a bunch of plugins I had doing all the things it does.
This was an April fools joke, but I’ll answer anyway ;).
I agree that Disqus makes life a bit easier for most people, and if it’s working for you then that’s fine. The same arguments can also be made for Flash. The broad antidote to Flash is HTML5 and other web standards, the antidote to Disqus will be when developers at WordPress overhaul their comment systems.
Disqus has improved over the years, but it still makes sites overly frustrating for some people to use, like me. While some people may be more inclined to leave comments if the familiar Disqus engine is there, I would be less inclined. Other sites let me leave comments without having to touch NoScript, so when I see a site that needs it, it’s harder to justify.
Disqus-like functionality could be done at the server side without any JavaScript, or certainly a lot less. The fact it requires it to leave comments is akin to a site requiring Flash. And yes, there are severe security and privacy implications, XSS being perhaps one of the more worrying examples.
I talked more about JavaScript blog comment systems in 2009 and this huge one in 2007 if you’re interested. Some of the specific concerns may be outdated, but overall I think they still apply.
Wait, you mean it isn’t run by crab people?!
I didn’t mean to ruin the joke, but you’ve mentioned it a couple of times and I’ve been meaning to respond to it, so I leapt at the opportunity!
I’m confused now.
[...] I disabled Disqus and tried to implement some of the same features manually. Rubenerd has been pushing his anti-disqus agenda for some time, and it ramped up when Taryn proclaimed it’s virtues and Zombie_Plan bleated and [...]