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Comment by metra | Hacker News Reader

A major feature that Jekyll is missing is commenting. Relying on Disqus, a closed source platform, is not ideal because it slows down page load times, does not contribute to SEO, and it does not let you host and search for comments in your git repo.

Some people argue that adding a dynamic commenting system contradicts the static html goal of Jekyll. Going along those lines, critics say that a conversation is best carried out on 3rd party sites like HN. However, for technical blog posts specifically, a two-way conversation helps illuminate finer points in the original blog post.

Googling around for 'jekyll comments' or 'disqus open source alternative' reveals many people who would use such an idea. However, aside from some quick-and-dirty projects, I see no compelling open source alternative to disqus that will include features such as OpenId, spam prevention, comment threads, etc. Does anyone know of such a project?

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Engineer from Disqus here, I work on the front-end side of our product.

Disqus doesn't slow down page load times because we use a non-blocking technique to load required files. We work hard to make sure that we don't add any performance regressions to sites using Disqus.

We are also working on making comments made via our product indexable by search engines.

As for the open source version of Disqus, I am not sure what you mean by that since Disqus is a service and not a program that you can download and install. People prefer Disqus because they don't want to spend time implementing and hosting discussion platforms for their websites just like people using GitHub don't want to spend time implementing and hosting developer collaboration software.

Anton

P.S. If you are having problems with Disqus slowing down your page, email me at anton@disqus.com and I will check it out.

Open source software is not limited to client side code. Reddit and hackernews are examples of open source software that is also hosted as a service.

Things like HackerNews, Reddit, GitHub and Disqus are more useful to everyone using them when they are provided as a hosted service and not a deployable software.

We give site owners a hassle-free discussion platform that can be integrated into their websites with additional perks such as moderation tools, analytics, spam filters (trained on the whole network of websites and not just one) and others.

And people leaving comments on different websites are now able to manage and control their comments across the web, and use their Twitter/Facebook/Google accounts knowing that Disqus will never abuse their trust. Boxed software installed on different sites managed by different people would likely never be able to provide neither the integration nor the trust.

But don't get me wrong, we absolutely love open source. Check out our Code page[1] or our public account on GitHub[2]. We released many different projects, some of which are adored by the Python/Django community (e.g. Django Sentry). I think Disqus as a product is better when it is a service and not a boxed software.

Anton

[1] — http://code.disqus.com/code/ [2] — https://github.com/disqus/

I'm just saying that your software can be both. None of the things you listed seem like they preclude Disqus from being open source. Here is a wordpress plugin that allows visitors to comment using their whatever account. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/social-connect/

Also.. uh.. This is kind of unrelated but you kind of abused my trust. I wanted to post an anonymous comment and thought I needed to provide an account for spam reasons, so I logged in, left my username blank, and it automatically put my first name in as the author of the post. I have tried to avoid your stuff since. I think other people were posting things anonymously so it might have just been my fault. Still though, I'm done with it.

You don't need to log in to post anonymously. Sites, however, can disable anonymous posting if they wish to do so.

And I suppose you don't give give your email when you want to post anonymously even it says it won't be published? That's what Wordpress does by default isn't it? I think that's what Disqus also does but it isn't clear. You don't divulge people's information without explicit authorization. Filling in the name field for me is not good. Maybe anonymous is the wrong word. I didn't want my stuff published for the world to see.

Now that I go back to it, I see that it links to my twitter account and provides my first name. I was thinking that just showing my first name would only be kind of bad, turns out I was remembering it incorrectly. It is as bad as I thought it was.

If we put the ideological issues aside there are some other potential issues about using Disqus that I have thought of:

1.) Control of data, I am not sure what rights I am legally signing away to Disqus when using it as my comment service.

2.) Continuity, I am certain that if Disqus passes away the service won't be there and only fools would offer a free service and ensure that the data isn't lost for what ever reason. How are your data liberation policies, a simple click for a zip or a tar-ball? Or would I need to construct my own back-up using your API? If the latter, is that allowed?

You can export your data whenever you want and the process is as easy as clicking one button: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/447925/Screenshots/ao8k.png

Nothing changes when you comment on a website using Disqus—your comment is published on someone's website and becomes their data. That said, if a comment was not originally anonymous, you have an option to anonymize it so that it is not associated with your profile and name anymore. We are and will always be on commenters' side.

This is what I can authoritatively say as a Disqus engineer. If you want more information, email to hello@disqus.com and folks here will be happy to answer all your questions.

Anton

Are you thinking of some kind of hybrid system, in which there's a Disqus-like web app to serve recent comments and enable the commenting infrastructure, but the comments eventually (on a timescale of hours) get rendered into static HTML in my git repository for long-term archiving, SEO, searchability, faster page loads, etc?

That sounds interesting.

My next question is: Does Disqus's API let me do this via... Disqus? Surfing through the API docs suggests that the answer may be "yes".

Yup, the API lets you do that. You can pull our your comments and sync to a local datastore.

Guide: http://docs.disqus.com/help/58 (though it's already automatic in our WordPress and MovableType plugins).

What about a form that lets someone submit a comment and it appeared as a Pull Request in your repository? Once you merge in the change, Github will rebuild your blog and it will appear. That would be kind of cool.

Or you could just have a comment link that uses the github website comments - if you are really interested in technical discussion it's probably fair to assume the poster has a github account

Hi,

For a developer, making your own Disqus is actually easy. And I have done so myself, with free hosting on top of Google's App Engine ...

http://alexn.org/TheBuzzEngine/ + https://github.com/alexandru/TheBuzzEngine

Don't expect the same polish as Disqus. This is meant for my usage mostly and I have simple needs.

> Disqus ... is not ideal because it slows down page load times

Do you know to what degree they are slowed down? I am observing that they load particularly fast (< 1 second) on this blog post.

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