disqus | Thought splinters

Disqus installation again

Tue, 03 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

A short personal note on my tutorial on Disqus installation: I have used for my screenshots, not this docdock but the hugo-academic theme. I have changed from docdock to hugo-academic and now (2017-05-31) I am back at docdock again. I will explain the reason for this twofold change in one of my next blog post. I am also planning to update text and screenshots to the new blogdown versions.

Update: 2021-05-19: Almost exactly four years later I’m ruefully back at the Academic theme again.🤭

In my tutorial How to install disqus on Hugo I have used the hugo-academic theme to demonstrate the installation process. The article was one of my first contact with static websites, and I experimented with it at https://portfolio.peter-baumgartner.net.

After some experiences with the academic website, I looked for other themes which are using more prominent the blog function. I came up with this beautiful and very functional hugo-theme-docdock website for documentation. But for the tutorial, I have used a different code for the integration of Disqus proposed by Yihui Xie.

In the meanwhile, Yihui has suggested his approach as a pull request which was accepted by the Hugo team. So I assume that in a new release we will all get this more elaborated disqus integration code in the standard Hugo installation.

Alternatives for Disqus?

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Disqus is a top-rated service for hosting and managing comments. But it has as an external service several disadvantages which opposed the philosophy of static websites diametrically. I discuss some alternatives for integrating discussion fora with static websites.

Disqus has a long list of drawbacks

In one of my tutorials I have explained how to integrate Disqus into your static website. But in this article, I recommend looking for alternative comment services. Why this different standpoint? In the meanwhile, I read several articles questioning Disqus. Here is a list of critiques I found on the web (without ranking):

Disqus is slow and has a bad (re-)loading behavior.
Disqus is tracking many different things for different customers, some of them hidden and unknown.
Disqus does not allow Markdown.
Disqus does not allow anonymous content (IP address, email, and name are recorded).
Disqus is hosted in the USA, which is considered to have less strict privacy laws than Europe.
Disqus is not open source.
Disqus does not allow that users can use free licenses for their comments. It is not clear who has ownership of the comments.
Disqus is one central authority collecting all comments of your website visitors and users on their servers.

A typical request log with Disqus enabled: There are 105 network requests vs. 16 without Disqus. Load-time rises between 2 to 6 seconds.

Especially the first and last bullet points defeat the advantages of a static website: Speed and all content always at your disposal. On a static website, data are just plain text files, saved locally on your hard disk. Therefore you can static sites transfer easily: Compress all your data in one zip file and unzip it where ever you want it. With Disqus, these advantages are not valid anymore because your blog text and its comments are hosted separately on different servers.

What are alternatives for Disqus?

Summarizing the disadvantages, I mentioned above I am looking for a system which is

free
open source
and does not host the user-generated comments centrally

The Hugo page on comments lists six available alternatives for comment on static websites¹. On AlternativeTo you will find 16 systems².

Cursory review on some services

Staticman

Screenshot of Staticman’s website

Staticman is open source and transforms user-generated content into data files to merge in your GitHub repository, along with the rest of your content. This approach seems promising for me, but until now, I couldn’t manage to install it. I have reported my problem, and I am currently waiting for help. As soon as I know how to fix it, I will review the system here on these pages.³

hyothes.is

Screenshot of hypothe.is' website

hypothes.is wants to provide “a conversation layer over the entire web that works everywhere, without needing implementation by any underlying site”. As far as I understand, for this approach, the data has to be stored centrally. So this software again is not an alternative to Disqus. This remark is not a critique of hypothes.is because it belongs to another category of software services. It has a new approach worth reviewing later in more detail.

IntenseDebate

Screenshot of IntenseDebate’s website

IntenseDebate is a feature-rich comment system for many blogging resp. CMS platforms. IntenseDebate is developed by the people who are behind many other well-known software services (e.g., WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Jetpack, Simplenote, VaultPress, Akismet, Gravatar, to name a few). It seems a bit odd that I could not find newer information on their blog than January 2014⁴. It is free but not open source, but it hosts the content centrally in the US. IntenseDebate is, therefore, no candidate for replacing Disqus.

Graphcomment

Screenshot of Graphcomment’s website

Graphcomment is a beautifully designed commenting service with a (limited) free plan. But it is disqualified under my criteria as the code is not open source and it hosts the comments centrally too.

MUUT

Screenshot of MUUT’s website

MUUT does not allow pre-moderation, e.g. every comment is online immediately. This is an interesting approach, but it is no alternative to Disqus: There is no free plan, and all rights of the user-generated content belong to MUUT!

ISSO

Screenshot of ISSO’s website

ISSO is a lightweight commenting service, programmed in Python, which allows anonymous comments. It is free, open-source, and installed locally. So it does qualify! But the installation procedure seems complex as there is no GUI, and one has to use the terminal for the installation. Furthermore, it seems to me that not all operating systems are covered. But I should give it a try anyway and review it.

Discourse

Screenshot of Discourse’s website

Discourse is a feature-rich open-source environment, supports Markdown and allows anonymous posting. As a hosting service, it has no free plan and costs a minimum of US$ 100 / month (with ~~80%~~ 85% discount for educational resp. 50% for non-profit institutions.). But you can install Discourse yourself without cost on your server. ~~Alternatively, you can pay a one-time fee of US$99 for a cloud installation with a US$10/month hosting fee.~~⁵ With the possibility to install it on your server, Discourse is another candidate to try out.

Using GitHub ()

Screenshot of Gazoo.vrv, Don Williamson’s website

Using GitHub: Another website is also recommending to use GitHub for comments. I have no clear idea how these proposed code lines will work in practice, but if it works, then it will certainly qualify: Open source, free, supporting Markdown and hosted by the website owner.⁶

Summary

I reviewed superficially different commenting systems. I was looking for a free, open source system, allowing anonymous content, Markdown and hosted by the website owner. Four services seem to fulfill my criteria: Staticman, ISSO, Discourse and a code proposal by Don Williamson. hypothes.is is an exciting project, but not a commenting system. It belongs, therefore, to a different category of software (annotation systems).

A competent review of these four systems requires a test installation, which I plan to do in the next few weeks.⁷

Update 2021-05-18: There are now ten services listed. ↩︎
Update 2021-05-18: There are 29 services listed, but not all are open source, and some have already discontinued their service. ↩︎
Update 2021-05-18: Even with some help by the developer I couldn’t manage to integrate it. Seems that my knowledge four years ago wasn’t enough. ↩︎
Update: 2021-05-18: Their blog is not updated anymore, but the main website has recent information, as the footer with copyright 2021 demonstrates. ↩︎
Update 2021-05-18: I adapted the changes of plans. ↩︎
Update: 2021-05-18: Now - four years later - I understand this approach perfectly. There are, in the meanwhile, already a bunch of different services using GitHub. In the new version of this blog, I am using utteranc.es a lightweight comments widget built on GitHub issues. ↩︎
Update 2021-05-18: I have never done these test installations. But at least I have revised this old article. I am still planning to look into details at least of some of these commenting systems. I am using now utteranc.es, and the Academic theme of this blog provides commento, another alternative to Disqus. ↩︎

How to install Disqus on Hugo?

Sun, 10 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

First of all you have to sign up for Disqus.

Create an account on Disqus.

2. Install Disqus

You are offered two choices after the registration process. Select ‘I want to install Disqus on my site’.

Choose ‘Install Disqus’

3. Fill in the form

Disqus needs some information for adding a forum to your website. I will add just two remarks as the form is mostly self-explaining. Firstly, the website name is a text snippet that will appear in the head of every forum section. It does not have to be related to you website name. Secondly, make a note of your Disqus short name as you are going to use it in step 5 and 6.

Configure Disqus for your site

4. Find discussion template

With the next two steps we are going to fix the problem of a faulty Hugo template. Look for the file ‘single.html’ and open it in the editor to inspect the content. single.html should be under /themes/<your-theme-nam>/layouts/_default. At the end of the file – just before the footer –, you should find the name of the partial template for your discussion forum (= ‘comments-html’ in my case).

Configure Disqus for your site.

5. Replace content

Now go and edit this file, which should be found under /themes/<your-theme-nam>/layouts/partials. You have to replace the whole content with the code snippet provided by Yihui Xie (Thanks a lot by the way!!). To help you, you can compare my changes at GitHub. But don’t forget to change the URL to your Disqus account [as I did :blush:]!

Replace content of your partial template as explained

6. Add shortname

To finish the installation you have finally to add the line disqusShortname = "<your-disqus-shortname>" to your config.toml.

Add your Disqus short name into the config.toml

7. Congratulation!

You have integrated Disqus into your static website. Go to one of your posts and check it. Your end of the page should look similar as in the following graphic.

Disqus forum successfully integrated

Critical remark to Disqus

I should mention that there is growing skepticism in the community about Disqus. People are not only criticizing slowness (load-time behavior) but above all they are concerned about data integrity. It seems that there are lots of irrelevant requests to track the data traffic for whatever purpose nobody knows.

Four years later I have changed to utteranc.es.