Until recently I used Disqus on this blog. During the time I had it I praised and promoted it, but I recently decided to ditch it and return to the WordPress default. here’s why.

The reason why I decided to start using Disqus in the first place had little to do with Disqus itself and a lot to do with the limitations of the blog platforms and hosts I was using. At that time I was trying to standardise the look and feel of my blogs. This meant writing a theme that would work on both WordPress and Habari. In the case of Habari my (former) web host had some out dated components which meant I couldn’t use the in-built comment system. In the case of WordPress a new comment system was introduced which, it seemed to me, was going to make my life difficult. I wanted threaded comments but styling them, and altering the HTML my way, seemed like it was going to be a pain. Outsourcing seemed the only option to do what I wanted and IntenseDebate was closed due to the recent acquisition by Automattic. Disqus seemed the obvious answer.

Looking at the code of the WordPress comment system I felt a lot of people would switch to a hosted comment solution. So many themes would need updated to use threaded comments and I thought people would flock to them. I have certainly seen a lot of sites using hosted comment solutions, but actually no where near as many as I thought.

So what was good about Disqus? On the whole Disqus is a fairly decent system. It is hosted, integrates with WordPress and synchronises comments. It has threaded comments, user management which verifies e-mail addresses, centralised spam checking and a points system for rating commenters. It also has e-mail replies and it lets you view comments on all of your sites that use it in one place.

In general then it has everything you might want and for a while that was my feeling, but a number of little things just started to annoy me.

The first thing I noticed was that it didn’t pick up spam as well as I thought it should. I started getting regular comments that I thought were obvious spam simply by looking at the name of the commenter. Names such as SEO Test with very short messages were annoying, but worse, they seemed to be verified users. The amount of comment spam posing as normal contributors went up and sometimes I would receive two identical messages but only one was captured.

Now spam is the cost of being on the internet these days so that alone wasn’t enough to cause me to come back. Disqus has a front end system built into the comment display so you can remove posts or block users. What it never offered me the option to do was to mark something as spam though. I found, after a while, that when I was removing comments they weren’t being marked as spam, and were still in my WordPress system, despite being removed from Disqus. In fact when I switched back Akismet picked up 50 spams just by scanning what was already there.

Just as Disqus wasn’t the reason for using it in the first place, it also wasn’t really the reason for switching back either. The biggest reason is that I decided not to build my own theme.

Since I started this blog I have pretty much built my own theme. I used an off the shelf for a while before, but not for long. Coming back to WordPress with a view to experience it in the same way as its users, using a theme that already existed and already coped with threaded comments, meant I just didn’t need to get to grips with styling and formatting the comments. The main reason I ditched it is really that simple: someone else did the work.

With a good theme that supports WordPress well there actually seems to be little reason to use any hosted solution. Having looked at IntenseDebate I don’t see a particular advantage there either.

In the end it really is that simple. Using Disqus was one more add-on that I could do without and one less thing that I could tweak. It wasn’t really wrong, it just created a barrier between me and the system, and I feel better already knowing it is gone.