In the previous post, I walked through setting up Discourse, a Ruby-based web forum. I’m in the process of shifting this blog’s comment system from Disqus, which I’ve never been wholly comfortable with, over to using Discourse instead. There is being done via a plug-in for Octopress currently under development by one of the posters over at the main Discourse development forum.
Why ditch Disqus? There are several reasons, but the biggest is the privacy concerns. Disqus tracks users’ movement across Disqus-enabled web sites, and I don’t like that. It provides a free, well-constructed, low-friction commenting system—that part’s nice, of course!—but I don’t like being followed, and I don’t think readers of this site should have to concede to being watched by Disqus in order to comment. Whether or not Disqus is harmless, and regardless of what they do with the data, I object to the principal.
So, we switch to Discourse. I could easily use Vanilla, too, since I already have a functioning Vanilla install and Vanilla easily supports being framed inside a blog for comments, but where’s the fun in easy?
The switch to Discourse is still a work in progress, and things aren’t quite working right yet, but I’m hammering away on it in my spare time. Currently, none of the blog posts have functioning comments, but we’re getting there. In the meanwhile, if you’d like to leave a comment on any of the blog entries, head over to my Discourse forum and comment there.
Discussion topic for the original blog entry at: http://blog.bigdinosaur.org//working-on-a-new-comment-system
