New Comments System

As the two of you still browsing the internet without adblock in 2019 will be aware, the enforced advertising shown by our Disqus comment system has been getting more and more obnoxious of late. We have officially Had Enough, so we’re moving to self-hosted comments as of this post.

This is a completely new deployment, so expect teething issues: if anything too catastrophic goes wrong we’ll revert to Disqus until we can fix it, but if it’s not game-breaking you’ll probably have to put up with it.

There are limits on the data Disqus will allow us to export, so:

  • Old comments are still there, but we can’t recover upvote counts. (I’m sure you had loads, though.)
  • We can’t recover your account login details, so you’ll need to create a new account. You can use an email and password, Facebook account, or Google account. (If you want email notifications about replies, you need to use an email and password.)

There are some differences with the new system:

  • There’s no built-in support for uploading avatars or images in posts: use Imgur. You’ll need to copy the actual image URL (something ending with .jpg, .jpeg, .png or .gif) if you want it to work as an avatar or an embed in your post. Please keep image sizes reasonable.
  • You can set your avatar under My Profile -> Settings.
  • There’s an Off Topic tag, which we encourage you to use, and an option to filter out off topic posts.
  • Most importantly, it doesn’t vomit terrible adverts all over our nice advert-free website or sell your user data1.

Give it a try below and let us know what you think.

Technical details you don’t need to read unless you’re that way inclined: We are running a self-hosted instance of the Coral Project’s Talk, as used by a number of Real Journalists including the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, with some customization by me. I have learnt more about React and GraphQL than I ever wanted to know.

Show 1 footnote

  1. I will be selling it personally. – Steel
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