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Discussion on: Is it safe to use Disqus for my Blog?

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supunkavinda profile image
Supun Kavinda • Edited

Hello! Founder of Hyvor Talk, a Disqus alternative, here.

Basically, I started Hyvor Talk because Disqus doesn't seem to fit my blog. Why?

Disqus isn't a commenting system. It is a data-sharing company, which collects data through its comments system. When Zeta Global (an ad-tech company) acquired Disqus in 2017, they started showing ads on websites to monetize the free plan. This is a privacy concern for all of the visitors of your website. On the one hand, they collect the data and sell it to other companies like Twitter (See data.disqus.com). On the other hand, they allow other third parties like Viglink to collect data from your website.

There are some articles about Disqus's privacy concerns.

Most of the Disqus's users are using their free plan. However, they pay a lot of money by allowing Disqus to track the users (like Whatsapp is to Facebook). And, there's no note about whether they turn off tracking when you upgrade to their paid plans.

Hyvor Talk is built to avoid this privacy concern. So, how do we monetize it? Simple: We use subscriptions.

Most paid customers of ours are companies who are integrating Single Sign-on on their websites (Check out FusionAuth blog, click Login and you'll be redirected to their login - not Hyvor login) and news sites.

Hyvor Talk is free up to 1 website and 40,000 monthly page views, which means that most individual bloggers don't need to worry about paying for the comments system. We do not track users or place ads even in the free plan.

For React, there's hyvor-talk-react

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patarapolw profile image
Pacharapol Withayasakpunt • Edited

Single-Sign-On is expensive Business $35 PER MONTH, otherwise $5 PER MONTH is as cheap as the smallest DigitalOcean Droplet (where you can host anything, anyway).

Do I have to care who commented to me?

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supunkavinda profile image
Supun Kavinda

Hello Pacharapol,

Thanks for the reply.

Yes, $35 can be expensive for some. But, our target for the business plan is companies. They are willing to pay more than $35 for the functionalities we provide.

By the way, do you have a website you hope to set up SSO?

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patarapolw profile image
Pacharapol Withayasakpunt • Edited

Truthfully, I don't really know whether I should have commenters' credential. Should it remain anonymous, or should it be identifiable? Safety (of both client and server) should be the first concern.

Currently, I use Remark42 (with SPA tweak), to make it possible to both anonymous and SSO with Google. It is self-hosted, so it does have costs. An upside is, I can use it with as many websites as I want in one database.

Indeed, an upside of using a paid service, is you get supported.

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supunkavinda profile image
Supun Kavinda

Truthfully, I don't really know whether I have about commenters' credential. Should it remain anonymous, or should it be identifiable? Safety (of both client and server) should be the first concern.

Usually, logins/SSO for comments are used by websites that already have an authentication system. For example, take X company that provides a service for 1000 users. To allow those users to comment on their blog, they will need to ask them to signup for Disqus, Hyvor Talk, or whatever commenting platform. If they set up SSO, they can allow those users to use their accounts on their main platform. (Users love it - so do companies)

Self-hosting or using a hosted solution is completely personal preference :)

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patarapolw profile image
Pacharapol Withayasakpunt

What do you think of requiring email, and possibly generating Gravatar?

Actually, Gravatar has its own problem -- dev.to/gajus/stack-overflow-is-lea...

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developertharun profile image
Tharun Shiv

My personal opinion is, requiring login will prevent bots from spamming your website.

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supunkavinda profile image
Supun Kavinda

Hyvor users can set their profile picture. For guest commenters, there's a bunch of avatars to select.

You see Gravatar everywhere on the web, because of WordPress. However, I don't think we'll use it because

  1. There is a lot of large databases for md5 reverse lookups.
  2. The default picture when the email is not found isn't appealing (I don't know if it's possible to change the default)

And, we don't want to require emails. It's completely up to the owner of the website (can be changed in the console).

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developertharun profile image
Tharun Shiv

That is amazing! Thank you for sharing your product here. Will test this out today. 🙂

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supunkavinda profile image
Supun Kavinda

Awesome 🔥

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katafrakt profile image
Paweł Świątkowski

This looks great. I've been looking to replace Disqus on my blog for some time already. But the only not-self-hosted alternative I found was Muut, which I did not like a lot. Perhaps I'll just move to Hyvor Talk then.

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supunkavinda profile image
Supun Kavinda

Sure, you can also import the comments from Disqus to Hyvor Talk in a few clicks :)