What’s that, you say? The Return of Comments!

One of the side-effects of suspending the cross-posting to Facebook that I announced yesterday was that you readers were again left without any way of leaving comments on posts here, something that, once I removed the ability to comment here directly several months ago, Facebook jumped in to fill a vacuum.

While I didn’t want to go back to old-school-spam-embattled commenting, I did want to reintroduce reader comments, and so I migrated the archive of 20,000+ comments stretching back more than 15 years into Disqus, something I dipped a toe in the water of in 2012

Like Facebook, Disqus too is “a commercial somewhere else,” but in this situation I think the utility afforded by Disqus makes this outsourcing worthwhile, at least as an experiment.

So comment-away, dear readers.

And, while you’re at it, revel in your newfound access to comments of yore: the Mac OS X Accounting Software for Canada? post, for example, has 175 of them, many containing really useful information.

Comments on the return of comments – and on the functionality offered by Disqus – are welcome.

Update later in the day: I knew that Disqus was too good to be true. I realized, almost as soon as I started to navigate the web, that the Disqus business model is based on its ability to litter cookies into users browsers tied to content, which is then sold to third parties as a vector for advertising. I noticed this because I was using this post on Transunion to test comments, and all of a sudden all the advertising I was seeing on the web was for Transunion. This kind of thing is precisely why I turned off Google Analytics, another vector for advertising data to leak out of the site, and so reintroducing this through the (otherwise quite handy and functional) Disqus seemed like a step backwards. So, new plan: I’m importing all of the old native-to-Drupal-stored-here-not-elsewhere comments – you’ll find them in place now, albeit rendered in a rather ugly fashion – and I’ll turn back on the ability to add new comments tomorrow. Sorry for the confusion. Lesson learned.

Update the next day: Comments have returned. Proceed as you were.

Comments

Peter Rukavina's picture
Peter Rukavina on August 18, 2014 - 14:48 Permalink

Hey, look, here’s a comment about the return of comments. Yeah!

Peter Rukavina's picture
Peter Rukavina on August 18, 2014 - 14:53 Permalink

One of the ironies of switching to Disqus to fill the Facebook void is that Disqus supports sign-in-via-Facebook.

Oliver Rukavina's picture
Oliver Rukavina on August 18, 2014 - 15:14 Permalink

wow

Dan James's picture
Dan James on August 18, 2014 - 16:06 Permalink

I kid. I kid…. I’m very excited about the return of comments. It felt like a hollow site without them.

Peter Rukavina's picture
Peter Rukavina on August 19, 2014 - 12:26 Permalink

Okay, I think I’ve got comments re-imported from the old Drupal 6 site (interestingly, I did this via export-to-Disqus and then import-from-Disqus), and the rendering of comments, while it needs some tweaking, is basically in place. I’m experimenting with Akismet for comment spam filtering, which is working well so far (it’s amazing how quickly the comment spam starts to hit the site once comments are turned back on!).

Peter Rukavina's picture
Peter Rukavina on August 19, 2014 - 12:40 Permalink

Scratch that: ran into bugs with the Antispam module for Drupal 7, so switch to Mollom.

Ron Walsh's picture
Ron Walsh on August 20, 2014 - 12:00 Permalink

Happy to see comments return, the possiblity of open dialog.

jypsy's picture
jypsy on August 21, 2014 - 18:20 Permalink

So much info was lost in the canning of the comments, glad they're back. Hope they stay.

Peter Rukavina's picture
Peter Rukavina on August 22, 2014 - 11:37 Permalink

Well, that seemed to work. Submitting comments via AJAX is a much more pleasing user experience, as it rips some of the long “wait, did that actually submit or not?” annoyance out of the process. I’ll leave this in place and see if it works more generally.

agen bola asia's picture
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