FAQ

A FAQ? Have you been around for long enough to have a FAQ?

Of course not. Using my precognition superpowers I’m antecipating what the frequently asked questions will be in the future.

Who are you?

The About page answers that question.

Any recommendations outside your website?

The, you can look ate the Recommendations page. It’s big, disorganized and incomplete but I’ll keep working on it.

Why do I do you use Disqus? Do you hate me and my privacy?

Basically, for technical reasons.

This website is a static website. It is more versatile and easier to mantain than most dynamic websites. The downside is that static websites don’t mesh well with comments. There are ways to enable comments in static files using a service like Disqus.

Disqus does have some serious disadvantages, namely:

  • They like to inject ads in webpages with no easy way to drop out, especially when your website gets big. The ads are usually very intrusive and distracting. You can opt out of the ads by paying a fee, but I don’t see the price listed anywhere, which means it must be pretty expensive.
  • There is no easy way for an unregistered user to comment. It is possible for those users to leave a comment, but the comment must be approved by a moderator before being visible.
  • Disqus is a privacy nightmare. They track users across several websites and probably sell you data to the Devil.

There are other alternatives, which I’ve chosen not to use (yet).

Livefyre, Intense Debate, ...

They don’t seem to have a good revenue model. Some of them are dead and the rest are probably dying.

Self hosted services

They all need some third party service to handle spam. Spam in blog comments is a huge problem.

It’s trivially easy to clone something like disqus (with better performance), but the hard part is also spam, and most good spam prevention mechanisms involve user tracking.

Google ReCAPTCHA, for example, is very effective in fighting spam, but it tracks users as much as Disqus, or even more. It has two advantage over disqus: I dont need to show any adds and it can load much faster. I’ll probably go down this road in the future.

Reddit

Reddit archives comment threads after 6 months. This makes it unnecessarily hard to reply to old comments. Apart from that, it’s a great platform for discussion, and creating an account is trivial.

Alternatives

Readers are encouraged to communicate by email (cryptonomicon314@gmail.com) and to discus my posts on Reddit or somewhere else.

This site is hosted on GitHub, and if you feel like contributing in the nerdiest possible way, you’re welcome to submit a pull request.