Ditching Disqus Comments

Dan Brown posted on the 17th of April 2017

Just a small update about a change on the blog here. I have decided to drop the use of Disqus as a commenting system and instead replaced the comments area with a few simple links to my twitter and to the BookStack issues page.

I’ve really liked Disqus and am grateful for the service they provided but it looks like they are moving forward with increasing their ad displaying and user tracking.

A few times recently I’ve noticed requests hanging when loading blog pages which keeps the tab loading icon spinning making the load time feel slow and you’d sometimes see tracking domains pop up in the corner of the browser. Looking at the network requests a whole load of requests were going out to ad tracking domains even though ads were not showing. Some of these requests were even failing stretching out that load time feeling.

Here’s two screenshots to compare the page network activity for the same page with and without Disqus:

Disqus Enabled

Disqus Disabled

So here’s what that shows, On a single page Disqus:

• Increased the download size by 2.5x
• Increased the request count by 8.5x
• Increased the total page load time by 25x

This was tested on a locally served maching so that will effect those results against Disqus’s favour but the difference on the live, remote system isn’t much different. From the above I’ve decided, for my use case, Disqus is not worth it. I’d rather have faster feeling pages and increase user privacy than have comments available.

Thank you to all those whom have previously left constructive and positive comments about the project. I am thinking about using something like Gitter as an alternative source of feedback and discussion but for now I’m keeping it simple.

Header Image Credits: Peter Hershey