disqus

[mlubin]

Disqus puts weird links at the bottom of blog posts, like:

Around The Web
How To Repair Your Credit About.com
How to Check a Fever Without a Thermometer eHow
How to Avoid Clutter in Your Home Lonny
The Health Benefits Of Brussels Sprouts SymptomFind

Why is that there?

[StefanKarpinski]

That's how they're making money these days, it seems. Not thrilled about that. I guess we could just turn off comments. The comments don't add that much since most of the real commentary seems to occur off-site at places like Hacker News and Reddit.

[ViralBShah]

I saw that too. I mean they need to make money somehow, and that's ok.

Given that we run an ad-free site, I would prefer to not have others showing ads sneakily. We could request readers to post comments to the julia blog, tweet, etc.

[mlubin]

Aren't there alternative systems for handling comments? (I'm not volunteering to implement them ;)

[ViralBShah]

Disqus is pretty awesome. Just drop in some javascript. There are lots of open source one, but you have to manage the infrastructure, although you do get to "own" the data. Currently, we have given up this flexibility for owning our data as a community for ease of use and focussing on the more important things - such as writing code. :-)

For example, a lot of our issues and the knowledge base is embedded in github issues and pull requests.

[StefanKarpinski]

I'm ok with three options:

1. turning off comments
2. putting up with these ads
3. switching to some other comment system (Facebook?)

I'm not interested in dealing with site hosting. It's a massive time-sucking annoyance. Having a strictly static website rules.

[johnmyleswhite]

I choose (2) and then (1) with (3) as the option of last resort. Many of the better parts of the Internet don't have any comments.

[StefanKarpinski]

Many of the better parts of the Internet don't have any comments.

Love it. Also very true.

[StefanKarpinski]

Closing this since we decided to just put up with the ads.