It may comes as a surprise, but WordPress has its own commenting system on the same server, instead of Jetpack, Disqus, or any other comment plugins. And Disqus, to no one’s surprise, almost always wins the nomination for best comment platform.

But just like any other commercial plugins, it’s unreliable. Much like Google Adsense, these kind of business models relies on control: the ease of logging in to leave a comment, but you, the commenter, will have to use another account, the ease of implementing moderation system, but you, the admin, will have to give up control of comment space. You end up sacrificing some part of personal information as a commentator or administrative control as a webmaster for better access and larger traffic. This shouldn’t come as a too big of a surprise. There is a limit to which degree they can offer a free service.

What really got me a year ago was Disqus comment DB losing most of the comments. In fact, until a year ago, WordPress still had all the comments going back 2008, and Disqus suddenly either lost/dropped these comments in its DBs. I don’t know what actually happened, but it also failed to notify me for new comments for moderations. Right off the bat, I can guess Disqus system saw how 3 different websites were managed under the same account, and how posts and comments were moved around, so it decided to organize them in whatever ways they saw fit. All I can say is that the service backfired spectacularly, and these comments should have stayed on The Mad Tea Party, not on someone else’s DB.

Another big ticketed item would be the actual moderation and long loading time. Disqus can barely handle large pool of comments; it is on its own designated server, so it is inevitable. The actual moderation needs to happen over the web as well, which also happens to take long time as well; not only it can be time-consuming, some of the spam filtering flat-out don’t work. At this point, I don’t see the merits of moving back to Disqus.

That being said, although I haven’t published any actual comment policies, I do want to point out this website will not discourage you from using alias, nicknames, pseudonyms, or even leaving comment as an anonymous guest with fake emails. What I am looking for is the actual discussion, and some talks need to be private.

note Dec 1, 2017: Originally the post, published on Jun 29th, 2016, briefly discussed the fallouts of using Disqus and why it came to be disabled temporarily. The post has been republished to reflect the most recent news, and the original post has since been retitled, “Jun 29, 2016”.