Jan-Lukas Else

Thoughts of an IT expert

Why you should remove Disqus from your site

Published on 2019-12-22 in 🔗 Links

Updated on 2023-08-19

Short link: https://b.jlel.se/s/1b9

⚠️ This entry is already over one year old. It may no longer be up to date. Opinions may have changed.

AI generated summary: The blog post discusses reasons why one should remove Disqus from their website, including the fact that it slows down the site, tracks visitors and shows ads, and inserts affiliate links in comments and content. The author suggests using a privacy-friendly alternative called Commento or removing comments altogether.

Marko Saric wrote down a few reasons, why you should remove Disqus from your website:

Embedding Disqus makes your site slow
Disqus tracks your visitors and shows ads
Disqus inserts its own affiliate links in comments and content (for example when you mention Amazon, it inserts an affiliate link to Amazon, to get a referral fee with every purchase)

It’s not possible to entirely disable advertising without paying for the premium plan of $10/month, but there are some settings that can make things a bit better.

There’s a privacy friendly alternative called Commento, if you really need comments.

I removed Disqus long time ago, first replaced it with a GitHub-based solution, but in the end decided to completely remove comments. Comments are a spam-destination and I don’t want to waste time moderating that. People can either send a webmention to my posts or send me an email.

https://markosaric.com/remove-disqus/

Tags: Comments, Disqus

Interactions & Comments

Jan-Lukas Else Comments A long time ago I had used Disqus on this blog for comments, which is not a good idea. Then I switched to utterances and at some point I removed comments altogether.When I discovered the IndieWeb, I added support for Webmentions. Using comment parade it is also possible to create an anonymous Webmention.But since I want to be careful to rely on as few third-party services as possible, I have now added a native comment feature to this blog.After commenting it is necessary to solve a simple cap…
- Anonymous A comment by Anonymous - jlelse's Blog This is a test comment ☺️
- Philipp A comment by Philipp - jlelse's Blog Mein Grund gegen Kommentare sind immer die ganzen DSGVO-Implikationen. Lösch-Kram, speichern von persönlichen Daten, etc. 🤪
- Marcel A comment by Marcel - jlelse's Blog I for one are happy to now have a place to let you know that I enjoy reading your blog. xoxo.
- Horst Gutmann Jan's blog now has comments - zerokspot.com
- Kedorlaomer A comment by Kedorlaomer - jlelse's Blog See also https://www.arminhanisch.de/2018/04/ein-kommentar-zu-kommentaren-in-blogs/. I thought you must know of this elegant solution. It requires some manual work, though — I cannot imagine you receive dozens of comments per day …
- Anonymous A comment by Anonymous - jlelse's Blog Do you have the source code for your commenting system shared anywhere or are you maybe willing to disclose how you implemented them? I've been curious about implementing them on static sites, particularly without the use of Javascript. I'm curious as to whether people are writing CGI scripts or just relying on web frameworks and I'm also trying to figure out how to best mitigate spam. Thank you.
- Jan-Lukas Else About my comments implementation I just got a question in an anonymous comment about how I implemented the comment system I was telling about.The source code for the comments, like all the other source code for my blog system, is in this git repository. Of particular interest is the code in comments.go and captcha.go.comments.go contains fairly simple code to display and store comments and provide a backend page that allows me to delete comments.Like all the blog software, SQLite is used for storage. But before the comments …
Jan-Lukas Else One of the tech news sites I read has switched from Disqus to native WordPress comments. Where uBlock Origin used to block more than 15 items (unfortunately I don’t remember the exact number), now only 2 items are blocked. 👍 (also for not switching to “Comment on Twitter” instead)