One of the side-effects of suspending the cross-posting to Facebook that I announced yesterday was that you readers were again left without any way of leaving comments on posts here, something that, once I removed the ability to comment here directly several months ago, Facebook jumped in to fill a vacuum.
While I didn’t want to go back to old-school-spam-embattled commenting, I did want to reintroduce reader comments, and so I migrated the archive of 20,000+ comments stretching back more than 15 years into Disqus, something I dipped a toe in the water of in 2012
Like Facebook, Disqus too is “a commercial somewhere else,” but in this situation I think the utility afforded by Disqus makes this outsourcing worthwhile, at least as an experiment.
So comment-away, dear readers.
And, while you’re at it, revel in your newfound access to comments of yore: the Mac OS X Accounting Software for Canada? post, for example, has 175 of them, many containing really useful information.
Comments on the return of comments – and on the functionality offered by Disqus – are welcome.
Update later in the day: I knew that Disqus was too good to be true. I realized, almost as soon as I started to navigate the web, that the Disqus business model is based on its ability to litter cookies into users browsers tied to content, which is then sold to third parties as a vector for advertising. I noticed this because I was using this post on Transunion to test comments, and all of a sudden all the advertising I was seeing on the web was for Transunion. This kind of thing is precisely why I turned off Google Analytics, another vector for advertising data to leak out of the site, and so reintroducing this through the (otherwise quite handy and functional) Disqus seemed like a step backwards. So, new plan: I’m importing all of the old native-to-Drupal-stored-here-not-elsewhere comments – you’ll find them in place now, albeit rendered in a rather ugly fashion – and I’ll turn back on the ability to add new comments tomorrow. Sorry for the confusion. Lesson learned.