‘Blog in isolation’ published 25 reasons why we should use Disqus, the hot blog commenting community and management system of 20,000 blogs, which also isn’t short of funding. I, personally, don’t think it’s so ‘hot’ and I have a number of issues with the service.
Disqus looks nice, with threaded comments, shared profiles and email updates, but it hosts and manages your comments on an external site.
- It will slow my site down
Remotely hosting my commenting means that for them to be viewed, I have to download them from another website and call them from a remote database. This, surely, reduces performance and increases pageload time.
- I don’t want to entrust my comments with someone else. They could get lost.
If Disqus were to go bankrupt, what guarntees would I have that my comments would not be lost?
- Many things Disqus provide have already been provided elsewhere.
Shared profiles: TypeKey. Gravatars: Gravatars. Threaded comments: This plugin. Editable comments: This plugin.
- Data protection.
IANAL but surely it can’t be good to subject users to another privacy policy with servers in another jurisdiction. Who would be liable for any breaches in data protection?
- Disqus is not open source.
There is an API, but it isn’t open source. Is it ever wise to use a system of which you cannot see the technical basis?
- It isn’t easy to migrate to and from.
If I wanted to leave, I would have to find a way of transferring my comments. Disqus doesn’t complement your current comment system, like coComment does, but replaces it.
- Disqus is a company. They want to make money. They could serve ads on your sites.
Disqus have the technical capacity to serve adverts on your site, as they could put them in comments or send them along with the comments to be displayed. You’d have to trust them.
- It is a fad which will probably fade out, meaning more work for you as you migrate back.
Do you remember that fantastic coComment service we all used to use? Its Alexa rank says you don’t.
Just wondering, have you tried Disqus yet?
Daniel Ha: I installed it and disliked the fact I lost my old comments and that it replaced my whole system.
Disqus is a tricky app — on one hand there are many little issues like you point out above, but on the other hand there are also many cool benefits. Some of the things you wrote about also have a second side to them.
For example for point 1, while it has to download the comments, the calculations and database stuff is done on their server which will save your own servers’ memory and cpu.
For point 3: yeah, all the things can be obtained from different places, but the cool thing about Disqus is it gives you a lot right out of the bag — there’s no messing around.
I think the main point of Disqus is connectivity — it brings all the conversations around the net together. Conversations get fed into things like friendfeed and of course the Disqus network itself — people can see what their friends are talking about, people can discover new blogs through this connectivity. I think it’s huge — it’s just a matter of getting it right.
Disqus is by no means a mature product, but so far it’s not looking half bad. I’m actually having difficulty deciding right now whether to use it for my new blog :o)
1. It will slow my site down
This is a valid concern, but you could configure things to fallback to a local cache of comments if Disqus is down
2. I don’t want to entrust my comments with someone else. They could get lost.
Disqus provides an API for backing up your comments. The Wordpress plugin itself keeps your comments in sync between Disqus and the Wordpress database
3. Many things Disqus provide have already been provided elsewhere.
Personally I really like being able to install one thing to get all of this.
6. It isn’t easy to migrate to and from.
I actually found Disqus incredibly easy to migrate to, and I believe it would be very simple to stop using it. It was basically just installing a Wordpress plugin, enabling it, syncing my comments database, and I was up and running. If I want to stop using it, I just disable the plugin and all my comments are already in Wordpress’s database.
7. Disqus is a company. They want to make money. They could serve ads on your sites.
They could, and the moment they start serving ads without my permission, I’ll drop them.
8. It is a fad which will probably fade out, meaning more work for you as you migrate back.
A lot of things online have been called a fad, and they’re still around. The amount of work to implement and to rollback makes it rather trivial in my opinion.