Migration to Disqus

Every single blogowner has problems with spam in form of comments. There are various ways to tackle this problem, the most popular I know of is by using akismet. However there is an upcoming new trend: Disqus.

The principle of Disqus is pretty easy: we manage your comments.

This goes from login over avatars to spam protection. Disqus even gives you, the commenter, the possibility to subscribe to a specific post by email or RSS. If you are a site owner, you gain a pretty good spam protection (which in fact seems to be akismet), nice moderation options and a fully fledged threaded comment system.
I have to admit that at first I am very skeptical with such services. I like to have everything local, which was the reason I built a very basic spamment protection. The huge problem appeared after some time: I blocked comments with links, but I couldn't stop the entire spam. I should have known better. Earlier this month I decided to take the plunge and registered at Disqus (heck, I even got myself a Gravatar. At first I simply commented on some blogs I like to read, to analyze the look and feel.

As you can see now, since today this blog has it's comments migrated to Disqus - and I'm loving it. Migration was amazingly easy thanks to arthurk's django-disqus. What truly amazed me is how beautifully Disqus integrates into my styling. I thought I'd need to wrangle a lot with custom css, but this was not the case. I only needed to make some minor adjustments:

/* Fixes width and div position */
#disqus_thread {
    width: 42em;
    clear: both;
    margin: 0px 0px 0px 64px;
    padding-top: 105px;
}
/* Hides the Disqus logo, usually at the top right */
#disqus_thread .dsq-dc-logo {
    display: none;
}
/* Makes the trackback field wider */
#disqus_thread .dsq-item-trackback input {
    margin-left: 2em;
    width: 34em;
}
/* Hides the "powered by DISQUS" text */
.dsq-brlink {
   display: none;
}

In case you want to fully modify the look of Disqus, go for it. They have a nicely written wiki page for custom css.

You might wonder know, why I changed my mine about having comments locally.

1. It would be a lot of work to offer the same connectivity as Disqus already does (facebook connect, twitter, openid,..)
2. Good spamprotection would have forced me to use akismet, which would not be locally. Why not do it completely externally?
3. Disqus is written with django. My webframework of choice. Amazing! (See http://djangositeoftheweek.com/disqus/)

Concluding I can only recommend Disqus. It's an awesome service, which I hope has come to stay for as long as blogs/comments exist in this known format.

Thanks for reading, I hope this post successfully communicated why I switched to Disqus.