Social comments integrated with dlang.org

[Vladimir Panteleev]

On Saturday, 29 December 2012 at 04:36:09 UTC, Andrei 
Alexandrescu wrote:
> All - please take a look at Sönke's integration of Disqus with 
> dlang.org:
>
> http://vibed.org/temp/d-programming-language.org/phobos/std/algorithm/balancedParens.html
>
> What do you think?

Sönke has listed the advantages provided by Disqus. I'll list a 
few disadvantages (some of which may be obvious) for 
consideration:

1. It is a free service provided by a third party.
    As their TOS states, they may cancel or limit the service at 
any time without prior warning. Although data export is great, it 
would still require finding or coming up with an alternative 
should the need occur, and it is unknown whether someone will 
volunteer for the effort.

2. It is based on JavaScript.
    The implications are possible usability/accessibility issues, 
increased page load times, adding another loading stage (the 
content will shift/rewrap due to e.g. appearance of a scrollbar 
once new content is loaded), and possible issues with search 
engine indexing.

3. It is not integrated with anything we have now.
    This is subjective, but I think it's not that great to spread 
ourselves over a multitude of services (some third-party), 
especially when there is some overlap in functionality between 
them. Discussions can be held on the mailing lists, newsgroups, 
wiki talk pages, IRC, Trello (?), and now Disqus. Is this 
desirable?

Alternatives:

1. Consider an open-source comment system which uses a local 
database and generates static HTML (solves problems 1 and 2).

2. Integrate wiki.dlang.org into dlang.org pages. We already have 
wiki integration to some extent (a button that currently links to 
a page on the old wiki).

3. Integrate forum.dlang.org into dlang.org pages, e.g. using an 
iframe and some CSS tweaks.

Disclaimer: I maintain forum.dlang.org and wiki.dlang.org and 
personally dislike Disqus, so there *might* be some conflict of 
interest ;)