Tuesday 3 July 2012

Disqus: discuss

I switched to Disqus about a week ago. Should I keep it?

Pro:
  • I've now added a few words for comment content filtering. I hate to delete comments for language. But I really don't want this blog ever to hit content-filtering flags in high schools or elsewhere. It's easier for you to use euphemisms or @#%! than it is for me to delete things where the rest of the comment, as poetic as it might be, doesn't outweigh the cost of potentially being flagged as not safe in filtered environments.
  • You, as commenter, will easily be able to go back over time and see every comment you've added. The imported comments don't do a great job with this, but it'll work with new comments as they're added.
  • I can easily go back to check other comments you've made on my site - Seamus and I both like being able to easily find helpful contributions from our commenters. Without Disqus, we have to remember the post on which the comment was made. With Disqus, we should be able to scroll back through a commenter's contributions to find it.
  • I had had people complain of problems in getting comments up under Blogger. I've not heard that kind of complaint yet about Disqus.
  • Any commenter can quickly see if somebody else has replied to one of his comments by hitting "My Disqus". 
Con:
  • It's buggier than Blogger; I sometimes have to hit refresh to get the comments. 
  • It takes more bandwidth, so viewing from mobile is slightly more expensive.
  • It isn't as pretty as Blogger's native interface, especially on mobile.
  • The imported back archive of comments isn't nearly as pretty as it should be; everybody gets the same null avatar, me included. 
It wouldn't be hard for me to flip it back; I have things set so that Disqus comments are synched with Blogger, so almost all of the comments would still be there if I drop Disqus.

Your preferences enter positively into the social decision function; please state them below. If there are implementation issues where I've likely messed up a setting in Disqus that you'd like fixed, I'm happy to take advice on that one too.


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