For the last few years I’ve been using Disqus for site comments, which has worked well enough for the most part. However, today I was reading this post by Chris Wilson that made me re-evaluate my choice.
Comments are important, but not at any cost. If you post a comment on this site, I want you to feel respected, and that includes respecting your privacy online. That rules out free options like disqus.com that have privacy (and performance) concerns.
While I shouldn’t be surprised, I hadn’t considered that Disqus would mine comments for advertisement. I’d like to encourage more engagement here and I feel like mining comments doesn’t achieve that.
Hugo has a fairly good list of comment options and I had considered Utterances previously but I didn’t want to clog up my GitHub issue list. In the last few years though GitHub has added Discussions to repositories and that seems like the right space to use, but not very accessible.
That is where Giscus comes in, Giscus allows you to embed GitHub Discussions into your static site as a comment section. This seems like a great solution for the same reasons that Chris Wilson outlined above:
- No monthly cost
- No ads
- No maintenance overhead
- Minimise the number of tools (This site is already hosted on GitHub)
Even better, Marco Ieni already had a PR for hyde-hyde, which I have now merged into triple-hyde. More on triple-hyde later, along with a couple other project announcements.