I do not understand why bloggers adopt services such as Disqus.
It is not hard to put comments on a blog. Really, it is not hard at all.
It is not especially hard to block spam. This blog may not be popular but it’s over 4 years old and gets a LOT of spam; sometimes thousands a day if some bot gets into heat. All is dealt with. It’s not effortless but it’s pretty minimal.
So why do people wilfully pervert the core strength of the internet’s redundant peer-to-peer structure and adopt a centralised commenting system for their independent blog? I just don’t get it. Especially the so-called experts at Ruby Best Practise who apparently can’t even run a fricking comment system. I qualify for “Ruby Worst Practise” most of the time and I have written and run several.
Here’s “Ruby Best Practise” as I experienced it today:
Thanks for losing my comment, matchless professionals at Ruby Best Practise.
Tags: ruby
November 1st, 2009 at 8:45 pm
Couldn’t agree more with all of your points. Adding comments to a blog is easy, handling spam is easy (and if you don’t use a standard blog engine like WordPress then you probably won’t even get any spam in the first place seeing as most of the bots are programmed to work with a limited number of known targets), delegating control of something so integral and important to an untrustworthy third-party is stupid, and delegation plus centralization is even more so.
November 22nd, 2009 at 7:39 am
I don’t know what kind of blog application they are using but I think they may be using one of the ruby blog applications that lets you write your text and upload it. So with this kind of applications disqus is a nice choice. I have written my own with codeigniter which can be found at .
November 22nd, 2009 at 11:37 am
That’s a good point Mengu. Maybe they’re using Jekyll or something, in which an “outsourced” comments provider might be an appropriate, indeed the only, option.
I still don’t like it, and don’t like those text generating blogs either! What is it, 1999? Generating text locally and then uploading it seems kind of bizarre and retrograde to me. There are countless benefits to having a dynamic server-hosted system, against the sole benefit of flat text files, being that they’re slightly faster to serve – not that it is hard to add full caching to a blog app. And the application you referred me to there looks so complex it may as well be a full blogging application.
If you’re going to have a flat-text blog generated by a script, the appropriate place for that script to reside is on the server, where it can respond to comments as well.
Hm, I do understand the appeal of a local working copy though. It encourages thoughtful and unhurried posting – the opposite of what you’d see here, lol. And a site with only flat text is undeniably simpler to manage – of course, that’s what I used to do in the old days, so I certainly remember the feeling. The problem is that you lose too much functionality, and I don’t consider outsourcing comments, search, etc to be an acceptable trade-off. Maybe something synchronisable? Actually, the simplicity of synchronisation was one of the reasons I was so interested in CouchDB a while ago.
Text generator blogs (webgen, jekyll, etc) are basically master-slave DBs where records can only be entered on on side – the master. Obviously, this is simple. But the remote slave – the server – should by all rights also be able to accept records. The need for this is plainly demonstrated by the use of crutches like Disqus. What is actually needed is a multi-master system which retains the simplicity of the first. I have been thinking about this for a long time actually. No solution yet but I have some ideas : )