Disqus comments adding third-party ad-tracking

[ploggingdev]

Shameless plug : As someone who was fed up with Disqus, I decided to build my own commenting platform ( https://hostedcomments.com/ ) with a focus on privacy : no ads, no tracking scripts. Having come across numerous instances of people complaining about Disqus and some even willing to pay for an alternative, I realized that this could potentially be turned into a SaaS. You can see the commenting system in action here : https://www.ploggingdev.com/2017/08/building-a-disqus-altern...

Any feedback is welcome.

Edit : If you're interested, you can register and add comments to your website. Currently there are no limitations on user accounts and there is no payment processing built in to the signup flow, so no CC required.

[Moru]

Good idea!

Two things:

1. Please make sure you support all languages (utf-8).

2. Some public forums want anonymous posts that they can check and allow manually but still need to know who it came from (newspapers in Sweden does this a lot). Usually requires entering an email adress every time and a checkbox "I preffer to be anonymous".

[rambojazz]

Is this open source and can be self-hosted? If not, it's just another Disqus.

[bigbugbag]

Will it survive sesta ?

[damnstraight]

You lose virtually nothing if you just block Disqus wholesale with an ad blocker. I'll admit it's quite nice for replying to comments on blogs, but there's no reason that a) needs to happen in a public comment and b) that you cannot provide an email for people to reach you at. In any case, almost all the good conversation is in a secondary place—reddit, hacker news, social media.

I'm far more likely to send you an email than I am to sign into an unaffiliated third party and trust their cookies.

[jasode]

>You lose virtually nothing if you just block Disqus wholesale with an ad blocker.

Unfortunately, that's not true for the blogs I read.

I used to block Disqus because (#1) it loads slowly, and (#2) it is a memory hog (Disqus' javascript code always has a memory leak in both Firefox and Chrome)

However, I ended up missing out on critical information that readers left in the Disqus comments. For example, if a blogger might review a power tool and a commenter might ask "what's that accessory you're attaching to it?", the blogger will then reply with the answer and may attach a link to the product in Disqus.

Similar situation with programming blog. Some followup Disqus comment may have a correction of syntax, etc.

(I wish people would stop leaving useful information in Disqus comments so I can go back to blocking it again.)

[dokument]

I modified my blog recently to require users to click a button before disqus is even loaded on the page. I think it gives the best of both worlds.

[kmfrk]

I'd say that the simplest default is to just block Disqus by default. You can always opt in for one of the like five sites in the world with tolerable comments sections.

Disqus usually still "shows" when blocked; it just doesn't load the comments, so it's not like it'll be hidden from you that way.

[kinkrtyavimoodh]

While it's true that almost all the good conversation is in a secondary place, it's also true that a lot of it would not reach the author, especially if the discussion happens in a secondary place that the author would not expect it to.

[jxramos]

Great observation about the secondary place hosting of comments. Once I read about some of the privacy weaknesses surrounding Disqus I have dropped out of all such conversations even when strongly tempted to add my 2 cents.

[cbr]

    there's no reason that a) needs to happen in a public
    comment and b) that you cannot provide an email for
    people to reach you at

I blog a decent amount, and I don't like getting emails about my posts. I'd much rather have the discussion publicly. When we talk in the open other people can contribute to and learn from the discussion. Putting lots of effort in a careful back and forth conversation with a reader is much less worth it if it's a private 1:1.

(If I wanted to talk about things where people couldn't be honest in public it would be different)

[greggman]

I don't think this article is correct.

As the blog owner you opt into ads on your blog in disqus. If you don't want the ads go check the settings in the disqus control panel and all 3rd party requests disappear.

checking my own blogs using disqus I see no 3rd party requests at all with my ad blocks off

[jayphen]

Tracking is turned on by default, but it's pretty simple to turn it off as the site owner. It's clearly marked in the administration section. As you said, with ad tracking turned off there are no such requests.

[sitkack]

Thanks for the reminder to install ublock origin. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock#installation

[kgwxd]

I've never made it more than 30 seconds on fresh browser install without getting several harsh reminders.

[FTA]

Time and time again we see "free" companies on the internet have three Lorenz attractors that they evolve towards: 1) users being heavily limited in features without paying a large enough sum of subscription money to subsidize others, 2) sell everyone's data and continue to operate, or 3) disappear.

[yuhong]

The tracking ad bubble is one of my favorite topics right now.

[beedogs]

I'm still hoping for #3 with Disqus.

[niutech]

Use Talk, part of the Coral Project by Mozilla (http://coralproject.net/products/talk.html) instead of Disqus. It is open source and respects your privacy.

[Hnrobert42]

I only recently created a disqus account to post a comment somewhere. Thanks for the heads up. I won't be making any more comments through their platform. I'll also block them using NoScript.

[edent]

One of the best alternatives I've found is https://intensedebate.com/ from WordPress.

Copy a line of JavaScript onto your page and you can host comments. Commenters can sign in with various SNS, or email. Easy to manage and filter. Email alerts.

Only one problem - WordPress have abandoned it. It still works, but there are no updates. So some of the icons look dated. And who knows what security holes are present :-/

[bad_user]

Any alternatives to Disqus for personal blogs?

[wyattjoh]

Also Talk [1], which you can self host! (Disclaimer, engineer on the team!)

[1]: https://github.com/coralproject/talk

[Libbum]

Yes, Isso [1] if you can self host. Whilst it doesn't track you like Disqus, it does have issues. For one you must have unsafe-eval in your CSP policy. That's something I'm not very fond of, so I've started to build an alternative: Oration [2], but it's not ready just yet.

[1] - https://posativ.org/isso/ [2] - https://github.com/Libbum/oration

[Arkanosis]

https://staticman.net/ if the idea of having static comments is a plus for you.

[dogecoinbase]

There's always Echo Chamber: https://github.com/tessalt/echo-chamber-js

[stevekemp]

I wrote a self-hosted alternative:

* https://github.com/skx/e-comments/

You can see the demo-page here:

* https://tweaked.io/guide/demo/

[astrobe_]

Let me be silly: go back to the nineties.

Provide your email address as an image, receive the comments in your inbox, append the really interesting ones to your blog article.

You really want to remove the spam and will have to do some moderation in order to keep your comments feed clean and interesting anyway. Making it a bit more difficult for your readers to comment has the advantageous effect that they'll think twice before writing. Moreover it also changes the way they write, because now they are addressing to a specific person instead of talking to everyone.

For sure it will probably drastically reduce the number of comments you get, but which one do you prefer: quantity or quality?

[anitil]

Old mate at plogging dev is working on one as we speak. He got a bit of traction here a while ago (can't find link)

Blog here: https://www.ploggingdev.com/

[foxhop]

I'm building a Disqus alternative called Remarkbox.

You should add your list to the private beta to join the other active testers.

Check it out here: https://www.remarkbox.com

[killerpixler]

One note as to the doubleclick ad server. That's coming from Google Analytics where your page view tags require the demographics add on (the name of which escapes me at the moment).

GA uses the double click network to give you those age, gender, and interest category information.

[bigbugbag]

While at it, OP might also get rid of CloudFlare, Google Analytics, Google Fonts, and the social buttons as they all track users for ad purpose (ok maybe not cloudflare but it is still a smart move to get rid of them)

[linsomniac]

A few years ago I migrated my company's dynamic site with blogs, articles and marketing info to a static site generator (Pelikan? Nikola? I don't remember). Part of that was moving our commetns all over to Disqus, and converting a few small marketing functions to Javascript (showing testimonials).

Disqus was pretty cool at the time, including their presentations to Pycon and their design. I wondered how the funding would go but was a pretty big fan.

Switching to a static site generator was the right choice, since 2-3 new blog posts have been written since I left. ;-)

[xpil]

I am using WPDiscuz: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wpdiscuz/

The free version is good enough for casual blogging. No ads, no tracking, visually appealing.

[shostack]

Is Viglink from Disqus as well? They overwrite links to turn them into affiliate links. Would not be surprised if this was happening in Disqus comments.

[pvdebbe]

I removed Disqus from my static blog when I realized how much it downloads JavaScript to work.