Mail from Bill · Neo Destiny (N4) #105

9 comments

1. 

   Mantidactyle

   (9 years ago)

   Reprinted

   Reply
2. 

   Adam Capriola

   (3 years ago)

   Hey all—I’ve decided to remove Disqus comments from the site. Disqus was a good platform (we’d used it since 2011), but I’m not high on it moving forward. Disqus has intermittently placed their own native advertisements in the comments over the years, without much warning. In the past I’ve been able to disable the ads by configuring an option in the Disqus admin panel, but currently I can only disable the ads by paying for their subscription service. I prefer not to pay for their subscription service. I also am concerned about how Disqus stores data and tracks user behavior across websites. Over the summer, for instance, they stopped sending full comment data over to the WordPress database here, which pulls us closer to reliance on Disqus, and that’s not a situation I want to be in. (I was able to restore most of the missing data, but I was not aware of this change either, and it’s disconcerting to see Disqus exert that kind of power.)

   So, I spent the past two days tweaking the default WordPress comments to look a little more like Disqus, because I do still like how Disqus looks and functions, and I think I’ve reached a decent compromise. We do lose a few features:

   1. Upvotes/downvotes
   2. Email notifications
   3. On-site notifications
   4. Editing ability

   The voting system I don’t consider much of a loss; it’s better to communicate through words than a binary tally. Email notifications I disabled a long time ago because I found them annoying. On-site notifications did help me to follow up with conversations, so I will miss them. Losing the ability to edit comments is the biggest bummer to me, since I very often edit my comments after posting and noticing a typo. I’ve found no obvious solutions to any of these losses, so we may be without them for a while.

   What we gain is stability (the comments are now plain old WordPress comments—they aren’t going anywhere) and there should be a small performance boost (i.e., faster load times).

   Please let know what you think; if you have any suggestions, questions, or any thought at all, reply here or email adam@pkmncards.com. Thanks!

   Reply
   • 

     disqus fanAdam Capriola

     (3 years ago)

     :( i love disqus. i’ll really miss it

     Reply
   • 

     OtakuAdam Capriola

     (3 years ago)

     Do what you need to do, Adam. The short version is that I do like a lot of what Disqus offered, but I’m not going to throw a fit over you moving on. Greater stability is good, and if you’ve got to start paying a subscription fee I can’t imagine you could keep as many features of this site free as you do.

     Slightly longer is me just saying I’ll miss being able to edit comments, being able to up or down vote a comment when it is worth a reaction but not a full comment, and having email notifications because I don’t receive the other kind (probably because I don’t stay signed into stuff for “reasons”). Nothing I cannot live without, though. The main things are good quality scans and text spoilers in an easy to thoroughly search database. :)

     Reply
     • 

       Adam Capriola Otaku

       (3 years ago)

       Thanks, Otaku. I will see what I can do about comment editing. I’ve looked at the WordPress source code to see what’s possible, and there’s not a great way to allow editing. Right now, anyone who has permissions for data entry is able to edit their comments, which is unintentional, but it’s somewhere to start. I’m going to try and hack something together to enable the feature, but you will need to be logged in to make edits (if I get this working properly).

       There are a few prepackaged solutions for email notifications that I’ll look into at some point later.

       Reply
       • 

         100000VoltsAdam Capriola

         (3 years ago)

         Forum sites can vote up/down and edit your text, and email notification, you cannot use the same coding they did?

         Reply
         • 

           Adam Capriola 100000Volts

           (3 years ago)

           There’s a lot of specific code that goes into a forum, and WordPress isn’t built for that kind of thing. Disqus is the only decent option I’ve seen that can be added to WordPress to make it more forum-like. Disqus is its own separate platform, though—it doesn’t exactly integrate with WordPress. It goes on top of it, basically.

           Also, everyone: Please do not speak unkindly of other websites. Comment will be moderated (edited or deleted) if I find them in poor taste.

     • 

       Adam Capriola Otaku

       (3 years ago)

       To follow up: I looked into comment editing last evening, and there’s no good way to make it happen broadly. I can allow users to edit cards, which consequently allows them to edit the comments (all of them—theirs and others’) made on cards. To allow a user to edit just their comments isn’t reliably doable in WordPress, for whatever reason. Any implementation I try to code will be shoddy and impose a security risk (I likely won’t be able to think of all the scenarios where someone could attempt harm, and if the WordPress core code changes, my code will break). For now, if you do want to make an edit, you can make a subsequent reply and I’ll correct the original comment for you.

       I also checked into email notification plugins, and I’m not a fan of what’s available. All seemed bloated or unstable to me. I’d rather come up with a custom solution instead, though I don’t know when/if I will get to that.

       Reply
       • 

         disqus loverAdam Capriola

         (3 years ago)

         bring back disqus! : (

         Reply