Disqus Commenting System on Mozilla Kerala Blog

[shine at mozilla]

Hello,

I came across this blog post [1] which raised some very serious red
flags. We use Disqus on the Mozilla Kerala Blog [2] and I don't like
the fact that it is there ( for multiple reasons ) :
1. Unalignment of goals / interests; considering what our community
set out to do.
2. The auto-opt-in to ads on the free plan ( which is our plan ) which
also tracks users and transmits their behavior on the Disqus network
to external third parties ( sometimes even without user consent [3] )
for targeting.
3. According to the linked blog post, it adds to the "weight" of the page load.
4. Unnecessary third-party integration

I also went ahead and checked the existing comments space to see
whether Disqus had any comments come through them that wasn't yet
synced to the Wordpress database. While there were 2 comments that did
come through Disqus, they were synced into the Wordpress database as
well.
We also have Jetpack [4] enabled on the blog which comes with an
enhanced commenting system that adds most of the technical advantages
that Disqus has. It adds-on to the existing Wordpress commenting
system complementing ( not overriding ) the existing system.
The "migration" can be as simple as just disabling the Disqus plugin.
( PS : I have tested this and it worked fine with no issues ) It's not
like we have a lot of comments on the blog and we're getting many on a
daily basis anyway.

Hence, I propose that we disable to the Disqus commenting system and
let Jetpack handle comments on the blog. That'd be avoiding a lot of
third-party requests being made from the website on page load of post
pages. I understand that the blog is almost as good as dead and that
there is no traffic coming to it at all who would care or be impacted
with this change. So, there is no incentve in maintaining the blog
either. However, I'm of the opinion that if something is online, it
needs to be maintained well. I know I haven't been doing a good job at
that in the past. So, here I am trying to reconcile for that lost
time.

~ shine

Links
[1] https://markosaric.com/remove-disqus/
[2] https://blog.mozillakerala.org
[3] https://twitter.com/martingund/status/1207327648093003777
[4] https://jetpack.com

[Akshay S Dinesh]

Maybe fix SSL as well?

On Tue, May 12, 2020 at 10:39 AM shine at mozilla <shine....@gmail.com>
wrote:

> _______________________________________________
> community-kerala mailing list
> communit...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/community-kerala
>

[shine at mozilla]

Yes, that has been a long pending task on the list. While, multiple failed
attempts have been made in the past, I still wanted to try it out again.
However, that got stalled with the OS upgrade activity ( though it was
un-related ). I didn't get the time to actually dig into the issues there.

However, this proposed change ( switching the commenting system from Disqus
back to WordPress ) is as simple as flipping a switch and wouldn't take too
much effort at all.

On that note, Akshay, thank you for being involved in whatever discussion
that I bring up here. I know it's only been 2 threads recently, but you've
been involved in both. So, here's me saying thank you for contributing.


~ shine

[Akshay S Dinesh]

The reason why I brought up SSL is if we switch to wordpress in-built
comment and (I don't know if I'm right here) if there is a login process
then the passwords will be sent over plain text.

On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 12:29 AM shine at mozilla <shine....@gmail.com>

[shine at mozilla]

Oh, you're right. I didn't think of that. However, I don't think it
would not be too impactful, primarily because we have login to the
blog done via Jetpack OAuth ( i.e., Wordpress login ). I believe,
Jetpack should take over the commenting system as well. I mean, it
doesn't make sense to have Jetpack login for accounts but not for
comments.

That being said, I will defer flipping the commenting system switch
until I can figure out how to turn TLS on on the blog.

~ shine