On Saturday, 29 December 2012 at 04:36:09 UTC, Andrei
Alexandrescu wrote:
All - please take a look at Sönke's integration of Disqus with
dlang.org:
http://vibed.org/temp/d-programming-language.org/phobos/std/algorithm/balancedParens.html
What do you think?
Sönke has listed the advantages provided by Disqus. I'll list a
few disadvantages (some of which may be obvious) for
consideration:
1. It is a free service provided by a third party.
As their TOS states, they may cancel or limit the service at
any time without prior warning. Although data export is great, it
would still require finding or coming up with an alternative
should the need occur, and it is unknown whether someone will
volunteer for the effort.
2. It is based on JavaScript.
The implications are possible usability/accessibility issues,
increased page load times, adding another loading stage (the
content will shift/rewrap due to e.g. appearance of a scrollbar
once new content is loaded), and possible issues with search
engine indexing.
3. It is not integrated with anything we have now.
This is subjective, but I think it's not that great to spread
ourselves over a multitude of services (some third-party),
especially when there is some overlap in functionality between
them. Discussions can be held on the mailing lists, newsgroups,
wiki talk pages, IRC, Trello (?), and now Disqus. Is this
desirable?
Alternatives:
1. Consider an open-source comment system which uses a local
database and generates static HTML (solves problems 1 and 2).
2. Integrate wiki.dlang.org into dlang.org pages. We already have
wiki integration to some extent (a button that currently links to
a page on the old wiki).
3. Integrate forum.dlang.org into dlang.org pages, e.g. using an
iframe and some CSS tweaks.
Disclaimer: I maintain forum.dlang.org and wiki.dlang.org and
personally dislike Disqus, so there *might* be some conflict of
interest ;)
