On: Replacing Disqus with GitHub Comments

[codinghorror]

I totally get the concern as Disqus is a third party with their own monetization and ad goals. But it still seems a bit abusive of GitHub as a free service?

Why not stand up a Discourse instance for your comments? https://meta.discourse.org/t/embedding-discourse-comments-vi...

[ploggingdev → codinghorror]

> Why not stand up a Discourse instance

Worth noting that hackers who use workarounds like this are doing it for the fun and since it looks like an unmonetized personal blog, OP presumably would prefer not having a monthly bill for servers.

For any serious project, I agree that discourse is a great option or maybe a custom built comments solution depending on the use case.

[MichaelMoser123 → ploggingdev]

yes, but the author is paying for his own dns name and hosting, so hosting his own discussions would be less of a problem for him.

Still he is right, the price for a free service is to be tracked to the right, left and center...

[manquer → MichaelMoser123]

That's a bit ironical.. GitHub is another free service after all, and they do have a careers business which essentially trades on your public profile

[gjtorikian → manquer]

That's opt in.

[myhf → codinghorror]

The blog itself is hosted on GitHub in accordance with their terms of service, and the comments are rate-limited by existing policies. So it seems like intended use.

It's nice to have the content and the comments handled by the same provider, so that they are available under the same circumstances.

[greggman → codinghorror]

Because Disqus is free and takes just a few seconds to add the snippet of JS code to your site to work whereas Discourse requires a 2GIG server at $10-$20 a month and then usually hours of configuration.

Discourse may or may not be good system but I find it sad that it has such huge requirements compared to old school php forums like phpbb, smf, vbulletin etc...

[codinghorror → greggman]

Only 1Gb is required, which is $5/month on some VPS providers. Redis, Postgres, Sidekiq, etc all need to be running. It's a modern stack.

[dan15 → greggman]

Discourse really isn't very good. If you want a more powerful forum system that doesn't need as much CPU power, get SMF or Xenforo or MyBB or something. If you want some new fancy thing, get NodeBB. Many of the sites that used to use Discourse are moving to NodeBB.

[codinghorror → dan15]

We don't see many NodeBB sites in the wild. If you want an old-schoool, traditional PHP / MySQL system, XenForo is a good choice, but there are a lot of critical security exploits, so stay up to date.

[pibefision → dan15]

"Many of the sites that used to use Discourse are moving to NodeBB"

Source? Data?

[dbg31415 → codinghorror]

I came to say the same thing. This option works great.

You can embed your comments as needed... customize / configure Discourse as needed... it's easy to work with (even across pages hosted on different URLs -- if you can set a Canonical you can call the right comments)... easy to add signups to your CRM... my clients running this setup have been very happy with it.

Disqus... you leave the site, you leave the branded design, to create an account and sign in... it's trash for real sites.

GitHub... seems like shoehorning in something not quite right. "Paint the cat orange and call it a tiger..."