As you can likely tell from the image header, and as this site continues to expand, I have switched the comment system over to the venerable Disqus platform. While I was more than happy with the stock commenting method provided by WordPress, I also was never completely comfortable with people having to login via social media in which they might not be comfortable leaving a comment, or logging in anonymously, in which *I* wouldn’t be comfortable with them leaving a comment.

I have to admit though, WordPress has so far caught 100% of the spam that has been levied against this site, and I can’t argue with those results. I have seen spam get through on many, many sites that use Disqus, and so everything here today is done with the understanding that if Disqus can’t handle the inevitable comment spam that will arrive, or in some other way becomes odious, I may have to switch back to the old way of doing things.

There are many advantages to Disqus. It’s used by many, many, MANY sites – I mean many sites. Big sites, sites with millions of visitors (I’m not there yet, but I’m working on it!). It offers an almost dizzying number of administration options, design options, it can be used across multiple sites and as a commenter you can see all your comments and responses in one place, and the best thing is you only have to log in once and you can comment on any site that uses it, as well as follow (or block) other users. It’s still social, but much less so than the previous social media logins which will hopefully be more comforting to some, yet at the same time it’s more integrated than them as well.

I should also mention that you can do a search on “Why you should never use Disqus” and “Why you should definitely use Disqus” and get a ton of hits for both, most of which are, unsurprisingly, the same. I am going to put my faith in it for now, but as I alluded to earlier there will be a probationary period in which I will evaluate its capabilities and effectiveness as well. It didn’t import 100 percent of the comments that had already been made, but it did import a lot of them, so that’s as good a starting point as any. There was a weird moment where I was importing comments that had already been made from the old system into Disqus, when I happened to notice this:

Hmm

It went up to post #4769, however this site only has 446 published posts including this one, and around 2500 comments total. So I have no idea what was going on here.

That being said, test it out, see how it goes, send feedback, and I’ll do the same on my end. I really do think it’s a good idea to have a Disqus account, it really does make things easier on many sites that use it, and beats having to have multiple logins for multiple sites; we have enough of those already.