YJL

Disqus 2012 was first unveiled in April, then went available to all websites in June. Some features are still kept untouched, but there are few changed or even removed, particularly the appearance styles. The following list notes some noticeable changes:

• No more Custom CSS: although Appearance Tweaks says there is a custom option via HTML element style, but its not there. You can only choose from auto, or two fonts and two colors for text. Either you like it or not, thats all you got. This is the most significant issue, probably only, for me. In my blog, the text color is #aaa not #fff. The reason I dont use latter is very obvious, pure white color looks too strong on this background color. Unfortunately, Disqus does not inherit #aaa. Another problem is the font, the default sans or sans-serif just do fit into my blog. If we still had custom CSS option, at least, I could override.

• No more detail Appearance settings: threading, depth, pagination, avatar size, date time style, etc. They are all gone. I feel Disqus wants to have a unified style across all websites. I recall I read a blog post somewhere complaining about the old Disqus tons of customizations. The blogger claims that would confuse readers who get used to other websites Disqus settings. Well, to that blogger, see what you have done, now we have none!

• No more Trackback: not sure if anyone actually used this. I think you need to copy that URL and enter into your blogging platform manually if you are linking to a post which uses Disqus, right?

• Up/down-vote option always: aka. the old Like button. There is no option to turn it off, but I like the voting options. This suits me well, let readers rate!

• Discovery: this must be one of major features in Disqus 2012. It provides a related content list, so you can reduce external widget/gadget by using this. Also a way to make money by having promoted content alongside your related list. I feel this feature is still too new and somewhat problematic and premature. For example, the related content list seems to be very static and you dont have option to change the list size. Its been only two months to the general public, still too early to give final judge.

• Syntax highlighting: if you wrap code in pre/code block, there is syntax highlighting enabled. Yes, Disqus is programming blogger friendly, hooray! Not sure if old Disqus has this feature, but dont dream that you can switch style to Zenburn or anything. That would only be a fantasy when you cant even change the style of comments.

• Threaded and depth is 4: no flat threading and since we dont have threading setting, Disqus has chosen a number for us, thats 4 levels. Back in March, I even added an option because of unlimited threading. I love threading, but itd become an issue when too many comments and depth. Now, the depth is decided by Disqus, I see it as a positivity since I have no control over it and can only accept it. But dont worry, the relation between comments are not lost, for comments at forth depth, there is an arrow symbol indication of which comment is replied to.

• iframe or no iframe: Disqus 2012 uses iframe and that comes with a price, the old Disqus creates HTML elements within the document you include the embedding script. It could be fine even if we dont have appearance settings, you can use CSS of your page to override, if the comments are not loaded within iframe.

• URL#fragment to comment is broken: if I recall correctly, when you get a notification about a new comment, you would be brought to the comment if you click the link in email. Now, it wont bring you there. Another problem with iframe.

  PARTIALLY FIXED, as of 2013-02-01T23:00:19Z, I noticed its sort of fixed. Disqus now can guide you to correct comment with the link you get from email notification. For example, you can see my comment¹ in this post is scrolled into view after the page loads. I think they dealt with the issue using load event, only does one; if locations #fragment changes again as if one click on link in someone comment, which links to another comment in same page, you wont be brought to that comment. So, its basically still bugged.

In my opinion, Disqus 2012 is a good improvement, though not everyone is happy with it, primarily about the lack or removal of options. Keeping things simplefor Disqus, itselfis nice, but over-doing isnt. Fortunately, the old Disqus is still available.

[1]	/2010/05/jquery-plugin-jk-navigation.html#comment-79622690

I was going to undelete it then to reply after I read this guys other comments, this deleted comment in this post was real, not by spammer. But I found out you cant undelete once deleted, so I am posting to reply, although I know this guy wouldnt have chance to read it. Have to get it out of my chest.

After I realized this commit is legit, my thought turned 180 degree. You absolutely have no rights to drop a F-word in a place you just got in. In fact, no places at all.

Such a unmannerly person.

You can freely judge my content, but you need to explain your point, not just drop a F-word and use the word BS, then leave. Such disrespectful act, that is not an opinion, but a barbarian roar.

Unfortunately, there is no options to report, couldnt find a button, only a blacklist. Even I know that probably not going to get him booted out of Disqus system.

Every time when I get an email notification from Disqus about new comments, I always feel happy and cheered. However...


I don't get many comments, the truth is the comments-over-post ratio is pretty low. (But I will not trade the commenting quality for quantity) So, this always punches me after I read the first line.

But hey, at least Disqus still does a great job, it does not let any spams slip into my blog. I don't need to worry readers read this spam comment which is written by a poor person who needs to spam others' website in order to get traffic.

A recent engage with a reader reminded me of a long existing issue with threaded comments.

I like threaded more than flat. They both have advantages and disadvantages. In threaded comments, as the depth increasing, you can lose in the discussion as you may have in flat comments.

One reason, I prefer threaded is because flat is very easy to get confused when read someones reply to another comment, which could be posted a few ahead. An experienced commenter would include the comment # or the commenters name, but its very problematic.

Another good reason to use threaded comments is some comments are asking for help, with threaded comments, I can reply/answer to the question specifically. The asker can clearly know which comment is my answer to his or her question. This is not something, you can work around with flat comments easily.

Threaded could easy resolve such confusion, but it has own issues. As discussion grows, it can still get complicated as flat comments do.

But another issue has bothered me more than the issue mentioned above, the layout. The comments section is a fixed width design, when there is too many levels of replies, the widths of deeper comments get smaller and smaller. Eventually, it becomes too narrow as you can see the comments in this post.

In Disqus, you can switch to flat or limit the maximal depth of comments. But I dont want to use flat or to have limit of depth.

Right now, there is a new option on top-left corner to switch between variable width and fixed width. It is not meant to resolve, but simply a workaround. I dont really have any good idea for a brilliant layout for threaded comments.

I took the chance to add a notice just before the comments, it says:

Please keep your comments relevant to this post and try not to comment something like only Thanks in entire comment, use the Like button of Disqus, instead. You can use some HTML tags if you like.

This was something I had wanted to do a year ago, finally, I added it. This blog is created with fixed width at 640px, I have to break it, which I dont like, but I dont have better way to deal with.

I just replied to a comment and noticed that I could actually used <code/>. So here is the post for testing and for adding related text and CSS styles.

Also here is a list of what HTML tags Disqus supports.

In the last few days, I got three Disqus comments and Disqus did email me about them. I use email notification to know if I have new comments.

Two of them were marked as spam by Gmail.

But both times, I have to see the comment on the post's page. First time, I was editing that post. Second time, moments ago, I scrolled down the home page to see how many posts I have published this month using the Archive dropdown list. I saw the post at the bottom has one comment, that's how I knew that comment.

The first case, that comment has six links, five to YouTube, one to Vimeo. It's a real comment, not a spam at all. The second comment, which has no links but only a simple question, "What is the table id?"

It's a real one, too. As I said before, spam detection isn't the solution, it's not fighting but avoiding the truth, which is we have lots of spam bombing us. It's like someone hates cockroach or mouse but this guys do kill them, he catches and moves them out of his house. But they keep coming back and breeding more and more. All the energy of this guy is used to move them out, silly.

These two incidents were not the first time. I had saved a few from spam folders a few times before and they were lucky. I currently have 450 over last 30-day period, so that's 15 spam emails a day. I guess I will clean/check up my spam folder every day from now on.

I now subscribe to Disqus comments feed of this blog. Just in case.

May I call myself by Spam Detection Victim if someday someone does want to give me one million dollars and Gmail put it into spam folder?

I just logged in my Blogger dashboard and saw this notification about new spam detection feature:

I have one blog (not updated anymore) has been enabled with new feature, here is its comment inbox:

Its nice to see new feature to be implemented but its arrival is too late to me. If we consider the whole commenting system features, I have boarded a jet flight already, Bloggers comments system is just a regular bus. I have been using Disqus for more than six months, it has much more features.

Better late than never!

I saw a posting on FriendFeed, the poster want a Super Feed which has contents of his FriendFeed Feed and Comments + Likes Feed. I think Yahoo Pipes can do this task easily, and it does. However, Pipes is extremely slow right now, it wasnt about three months ago. In other words, I havent used Pipes for three months, hope the issue is just temporary.

Here is the full view of this Pipe:

It uses three types of modules:

• Fetch Feed: On the top, they grabs your two feeds.
• Union: At middle, it combines all its inputs, which are your two feeds in this case.
• Sort: You need to sort the output of Union, because the output of Union is all items in first feed, then all items in second feed. That wasnt what we expected, it should be sorted by published date (time).

I think you can clone my pipe, and replace feed sources with yours (in Fetch Feed modules). If you cant, just drag-and-drop by following the figure above. You can also check out the RSS feed directly.