
The new Disqus 2012: Elevating the Discussion - dctrwatson
http://blog.disqus.com/post/25017922977/the-new-disqus-2012
======
mechanical_fish
I block third-party cookies, and as a result I never see a Disqus comment.
I've found that if I don't allow Disqus to set a cookie their JavaScript
widget just spins ineffectively.

I wonder if the new Disqus will stop requiring me to send them a tracking
cookie in order to _read_ the comments. (I accept the need to identify myself
if and when I want to post. But it would be nice to be able to _visit_ a web
site with Disqus installed without that visit going into my permanent record
next to my name.)

~~~
bentlegen
Not only do we not require you to set third-party cookies to _read_ comments
(we never did afaik), the new version also allows all users - regardless of
cookie settings - to comment. It just won't remember your session between page
refreshes.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Very good, thanks. I was certainly hoping that I had misdiagnosed this
problem, and apparently I did.

I'll follow the suggestions of the other commenters and suspect the Do Not
Track plugin. I guess the fact that my problems go away when I whitelist
Disqus cookies is some sort of crazy side effect of my crazy toolchain.

------
markessien
The new disqus feels very much like the users are actually disqus users that
happen to be commenting on your site. Not your users talking on your site. I'd
put this on a fun site or a site I did not care very much about, but on a
business related site, I'd want to control my own users and not hand them all
over to disqus.

~~~
bonaldi
This is a huge advantage. I want to be a disqus user, not a user of 4000 tiny
blogs. When I make comments on x, y and z random blogs, I want to be able to
follow replies to them in one central place.

I especially don't want to give a username and password to all these little
poorly-secured blogs.

If you want to "control" "your" users, build your own comments system. And
turn off RSS.

~~~
simonbrown
> I especially don't want to give a username and password to all these little
> poorly-secured blogs.

How many blogs require you to create a blog to post?

> And turn off RSS.

What's wrong with RSS?

~~~
bonaldi
Nearly all blogs require you to authenticate with some kind of account. The
alternative is spam city.

RSS: There's nothing wrong with it. But if you object to Disqus centralising
"your" users, you should equally object to eg Google Reader centralising them.
It's exactly the same principle. You lose "control", to the benefit of the
user.

------
mike-cardwell
I'd love to see somebody develop a free clone of this which cuts out the
middleman and lets you host it on your own server.

[edit] The videos are pretty good. Their use of "FaceCrack" in the second
video is a little cringe-worthy though.

~~~
bretthoerner
One of the biggest benefits of Disqus is the size of their network. I'm
already logged into Disqus and thus can easily reply to someone, comment,
upvote and share. When I go to sites that expect me to make a new account,
provide my email to a stranger, or give them auth via my Twitter account I
likely won't bother at all. Disqus also offers a full account export (or they
have in the past, I haven't checked lately) if you ever really feel like you
want to go self-host.

~~~
sho_hn
The hypothetical self-hosted version would be a perfect candidate for OpenID
auth I guess ...

------
samwillis
I'm interested to know what their new architecture is, I believe that they are
a Django shop. Does anyone know if they are still using Django and if so what
method they used to do real time?

~~~
Fluxx
Django still powers a lot of the DISQUS infrastructure. That said, we're in
the process of breaking certain parts of it off into independent services and
out of Django. But Django will be the main component for the foreseeable
future.

~~~
ptrklly
Could you talk a bit about why you're doing that?

~~~
zeeg
Don't misread what Fluxx is saying. The core of disqus and our primary data
flows are still powered by Django and that won't change. New servers which are
less complex (e.g. the realtime system) are generally written on top of Flask.

------
sync
The interactive demo on <http://disqus.com> is pretty amazing.

~~~
zachwill
It's one of the best interactive walkthroughs I've seen. Executed incredibly
well.

------
streptomycin
I've never used Disqus, and I guess this might be off topic, but...

Do they let you export the comments people leave on your website so you can
easily switch to another commenting platform?

~~~
Jimmie
Yes, IIRC it's one of their big selling points. You can easily get your data
out and use it for whatever you want. For example I believe many Jekyll blogs
use Disqus for comments and periodically grab all the comments then write them
into the html so that google will spider the comment section.

------
wetherbeei
This is still just threaded comments with some fluff on top for discovery and
community. Threaded comments have been around forever, and they don't scale
well for big communities.

Someone needs to take the idea of "semantic comments" and run with it to
visualize community reactions.

------
michaelhoffman
If you use Disqus on your site, I'm not going to comment on it. More than once
comments I entered via Disqus have vanished into the ether. Disqus claims that
the site owner deleted my comment, but the owner publicly says they have done
no such thing. Disqus then refused to do anything further.

Since I don't know whether Disqus comments will actually stick around or not,
it seems like a waste of time to participate. The fingerpointing from their
support staff didn't fill me with confidence.

~~~
noodlezrulez
We've made a lot of improvements to the system (including the spam filter)
since you last contacted us — are you still seeing similar issues? If so, we
are always happy to take a look. Feel free to contact Support if you are
having trouble: <http://disqus.com/support>

