PSA: If you have a site with Disqus, check if “Recommendations” are on | Hacker News Reader

PSA: If you have a site with Disqus, check if “Recommendations” are on

24 pointsrocho5 comments

A few days ago Disqus released a featured called "Recommendations" [0]. I haven't received any email about it, and it's enabled by default. It inserts additional HTML on top of the comments, and when I first checked my site I thought that my site had been hacked or something, especially because one of the recommendation was for a different site altogether! [1] It's a Japanese site that I never heard of, does not have similar content to my site, and it's of course on a different domain, so why did Disqus think it was ok to include?

I don't know why Disqus thought it was ok to add HTML and outbound links without even sending an email first. After this, I surely won't use Disqus anymore, and if there was a way to migrate without losing comments I would remove it from my site too.

To make sure recommendations are disabled for your site, go here: https://<your site slug>.disqus.com/admin/settings/recommendations/

[0]: https://help.disqus.com/en/articles/3517730-recommendations

[1]: https://imgur.com/a/i3orUx6

This feature is more evil than I thought!

After turning it off, it displays a message on top of the comments with a link to turn it on. Incredible.

https://imgur.com/9pZpTq2

> I don't know why Disqus thought it was ok to add HTML and outbound links without even sending an email first.

Disqus has proven time and again to not value user privacy [0]. I've been maintaining a blog post [1] with many alternatives to choose from.

[0] https://notes.ayushsharma.in/2017/09/im-killing-disqus-comme...

[1] https://darekkay.com/blog/static-site-comments/

Another alternative is to use NNTP for the blog (I thought of this but it look like someone else independently had the same idea some time ago, I remember seeing it mentioned on HN); users can then post follow-up messages if wanted, too. The web page can still display the blog converted to HTML (from plain text or markdown or gemini or whatever; ideally a format readable even as plain text even if you do not have a program to parse the format it is in to make the fancy rendering).

(Maybe in future, the "blog mode" function can be added into my (or others) NNTP server software. Actually it already includes the HTTP as well as the NNTP, although the web interface implement is incomplete. But, it can be worked someone might be able to adapt it for blog commenting if wanted, maybe.)

Well they have a team of 50+ people and spend god knows how much on marketing. They gotta make all that back and then some. It never made sense how they would offer this for free without having evil monetization techniques like this.

If you have a site with disqus, please remove disqus.

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