Disqus commenting disabled, revering back to original

Discussion within this website has had its ups and downs within the years. Initially when the site launched back in 2014, message boards were launched alongside it. The message boards had a decent community (running on Invision power Board 4.x.), however, the website and the forums were not communicating with each other too well (comments and threads on the website would not auto-post onto the forum). To make a cohesive experience, I went ahead and looked at other forum software (Vanilla, phpBB, etc.), one that ran well with the software that this site is deployed on.

However, there were still tradeoffs with the other forum software. While the site and the forum were speaking to each other now (that is, whenever new posts and comments was posted here, they would auto-upload to the forums), the SSO (single-sign-on) didn’t always work. UserID’s actually got mixed up…and yeah, that was a headache. Frustrated, I gave up on this idea and defaulted to what everybody was doing at the time: Running the website’s comments on Disqus, and shutting down the message boards.

I don’t really have any regrets closing down the message boards. I still love them, and post on quite a few. However, smaller, more niche boards (such as the one that was here) pale in comparison to what could have been back in the early to mid 00’s. Nowadays, communities are held on Discord, Reddit, and other social media groups. I do, however, have some regrets with migrating the comments over to Disqus. It can be boiled down to a few reasons:

• Native comments broke.
• Number of comments listed broke.
• Disqus started placing very risqué ads on their installations unless the user paid monthly for a premium plan.
• Third party now held the community discussion.
• Limitations within what users could comment.
• Performance issues.
• Privacy concerns.

It goes without saying, but Disqus has been removed off of this website for the above reasons. With that said, we have reverted back to the native commenting system. The good news? The commenting software of this website is much better than what it was years ago. Now, third party extension support is available (hello GIPHY!), upvotes, downvotes, chained replies, and more!

Message boards are still an idea that peaks my interest. However, it is unlikely that we will return to message boards. Good forum software nowadays costs a decent amount of money, and given the trends with with Discord and Reddit, I’m more content without a forum for this website. Regardless of that, users can still login, register, and leave comments on any article here.