I am thinking of disabling Disqus on SST. Many commenters here find them difficult to deal with and lately they have stopped posting approved comments on some basis that is obscure. Disabling the service will cause some loss of posted comments, but it may be worth it. Opinions? pl
RSS- Harper on the Treaty of Westphalia
- A truck tries to penetrate into the Quantico Marine Corps Base
- Drone Warfare… What is to be done?
- 500 Years of Western Dominance: Is it Coming to an End and What Comes Next?
- “Vladimir Putin removes Sergei Shoigu from Russian defence ministry”
- The 42 sins by mcohen
- Open Thread – 10 May 2024
- Russia can lose this war by Timothy Snyder
- Inaugural crewed launch of Boeing’s Starliner
- Orangutans and traditional medicine
Hello Colonel, I am certainly with you. I have found Disqus to be more than a little annoying and I wonder what their security is really like. Please disable Disqus.
Regards,
David
I decided to dump disqus. They are as much a left wing social experiment intent on build “communities” across the word s anything else. As TTG mentioned comments have been disappearing from the blog on what appear to be an arbitrary judgment that threads should be shorter. There will be some disruption as a I return to the old way f doing things. pl
I prefer the old comments.
1. I used “Recent comments” a lot to view active discussions. With Disquss these are not visible.
2. Disquss is often very slow or unresponsive.
3. No Disquss account required. The old comment system probably makes it easier for trolls and other unwanted posters (eg adverts) to post. This probably generates a lot of moderating work. Maybe some of this could be delegated to others? I don’t know if that’s possible with typepad.
Good. Commenters who confront the official narrative are routinely blocked by Disqus across their entire platform of 75,000 websites.
No explanation offered, of course.
I left DIA in 1994. I was not there.
Disqus certainly seems to have a sjw component, appreciate you removing it.
Am I alone in being unable to see any of the comments on recent posts? The very interesting discussions of the ‘True Pundit’ piece and Larry’s account of how he was sat on when he sought to expose the GCHQ role in the coup attempt seem to have vanished into ether.
Disqus never swallowed any of my SST posts, to my knowledge, but censorship was always a risk with using a third party platform. Whatever works for the ringmaster, I just hope the trolls don’t return with the ability to post anonymously again.
I am slightly alarmed that all existing comments seem to have disappeared, do you plan on importing these? When the move to Disqus was mooted I recall seeing that TypePad can import a whole blog (e.g. from WordPress) but I can’t find anything on importing comments only. I know you can export Disqus comments in XML format (see link) so I hope some way can be found to import them back into SST in the old (new) comment format, for posterity.
https://help.disqus.com/import-export-and-syncing/importing-exporting
I don’t mind at all your decision to leave. I am becoming increasingly suspicious of all the intermediaries trying to insert themselves into the discussion process here in the land o’ Internet. It seems that each come with a pre-sharpened axe to grind and using them increasingly limits discussion.
I don’t know how to do that and it is probably not worth spending my energy on it.
A price you pay for dumping disqus. Sorry
Ah. I see. When I read this early this morning before having my coffee I misunderstood what was being said; what the issue was.
Yes, Disqus is another social media Borg tool. It gathers info on all of us to be analyzed by God only know who and it does censor.
Sadly, the comments for all of the recent posts are now gone (or not visible). Like Mr. Habbakkuk says, it is a shame to lose responses from people like LJ.
I am happy to set up my own trial TypePad account & see if I can figure out how to import Disqus comments into this format. If I am successful I’ll be in touch directly Colonel, to save clogging up this thread.
Excellent choice!
I know that there are several people at MoA that expressed dissatisfaction with Discus commenting, including Bernard (aka “b”), so you may see more engagement at SST.
I agree with your decision to dump Disqus. The fact that David Habakkuk has been unable to even see comments on recent posts is a huge red flag.
yaay.. disqus is gone!
I see ditching Disqus as a kickback against the digital Stasi.
Sounds like a good idea tbh.
I’ve had difficulty getting it to use my usual name johnf for several months now so have not been posting here. Instead it insists on posting my real name.
Yes they track you across other platforms and block you globally.
Nothing is neutral.
optimizing the ratio of goose shit to golden eggs is one of life’s ongoing/recurrent challenges.
P.S. this [metaphor for Disqus] does not work.
https://i.etsystatic.com/13309198/r/il/8ad4a5/1655541485/il_794xN.1655541485_d0vx.jpg
So after some investigation TypePad docs say: “Before disabling Disqus commenting, please consider that comments submitted through Disqus can not be transferred back to your Typepad blog”. This is indeed Disqus’ price of admittance, leave your data behind at the door..
Zeta Global bought Disqus a little over a year ago. Zeta’s roots are back in managing massive (paper) junk mail advertising campaigns and fine-tuning recipient lists for clients. That’s morphed into data fusion and AI analytics to consolidate internet user identities across any applications – supposedly for marketing purposes. Google and Facebook (among many others) do the same thing.
Zeta grab data from all over: emails, Twitter, Facebook, IP addresses and anything else (public sources) they can get. They went on a buying spree to gobble up existing data sources to help profile you – Disqus was only one of dozens of internet outfits they acquired. Then put all that data together to figure out who you really are everywhere online and in person. Then they sell this ‘marketing data’ to corporations… or governments, if you’re a conspiracy nut like me.
Disqus was pretty small when acquired – maybe 50 or so employees. Zeta typically fires a lot of staff after their acquisitions and transfers their jobs to India. Disqus was also gutted after it’s acquisition. Zeta just wanted its user database – it has no real interest in throwing money at Disqus to make it better. It’s just another data vacuum for them.
Disqus will never let search engines index the comments it collects, so it’s a good way to hide ‘uncomfortable’ information its clients would prefer nobody can find or see. Say, like on consumer review sites Disqus manages. The comments you see are linked from Disqus’ servers, that’s why it slows down sites. The only thing a search engine can see is the article itself and a link to the Disqus comments.
If this all sounds really creepy, well… it is. Zeta, like the Stasi, needs to know everything about everyone. Your identity ‘profile’ is the product. But they assure everyone that your privacy is safe with them – they just sell the metadata.
Good decision to abandon disquis. I have been on their s*list for years. I expect to be an occasional commenter again
Hallelujah, Colonel. I never much liked Disqus. Quite apart from everything else, the inability to easily view the most recent comments was a constant annoyance.
Hi Pat,
a good decision.
Always love reading your words as well as the comments. I commute by bus for 2 hours twice a week. The print in Disqus is just too damn small to read on a smart phone so have stopped reading. I would only post three or four times a year.
jackrabbit – at 10,000 hits per day I think SST has little chance of more readership. You all are just too smart to make good playmates for the rabble that infest most sites.
David Habakkuk | 13 April 2019 at 09:54 AM
Disqus comment threads for previous SST articles are still available at the Disqus site itself. They are not searchable by article, comment or user. The articles are listed in reverse chronological order by default. Seems like you can scroll down through older articles as long as your patience holds out.
You can’t click on the article title itself to see the related Disqus comments – that will just bring you back here to (previous articles) empty comment sections. You have to click on the comment count at the bottom of each article, e.g., “36 Comments”.
List of Disqus SST articles:
https://disqus.com/home/forum/sic-semper-tyrannis/
” … Six US Agencies Conspired …” w/Disqus comments:
https://disqus.com/home/discussion/sic-semper-tyrannis/sic_semper_tyrannis_six_us_agencies_conspired/
I tried a test posting to that article through the Disqus page and it went into the Disqus approval queue to die a slow death.
I am not digitally knowledgeable enough to understand the deeper problems other people are reporting due to disqus. At my shallower level, I note that disqus keeps sending me unwanted emails. Also,
when I am using the public library computers, I can’t even sign on with disqus at all. That was never a problem with TypePad.
After reading what PavewayIV has written about the Indian company Zeta buying numerous web and net entities in order to turn them into undisclosed spycams for Zeta; I think it would be nice if PavewayIV or someone else could publish the whole list of all the companies Zeta bought, so we can avoid all these tainted spycam companies.
Colonel – on the comment section of SST, I shall try Paveway IV’s method detailed above and hope that those comments remain accessible using this method.
In the past I also used Wayback to access older articles and comments. I found that faster. Wayback does not seem as easy to use now and it would be good if one of your contributors better versed in IT than am I could state whether this method still works.
English Outsider
.
Colonel – You can ask Disqus to export all their SST articles/comments into a single archive file, which they will then email to you. It would be nice to have even though you have no desire to beat it back into Typepad. They’ll export it in WordPad format and compress it. A relatively competent computer geek can work with that if you ever want to use the data. That export request can be made on your Disqus admin page if you still have access.
different clue – Zeta Global isn’t an Indian company, they just ship the IT jobs there (or other cheaper offshore locations) when gutting their latest acquisitions. Zeta’s HQ is in Midtown Manhattan, but they have offices all over the world. Disqus was Silicon Valley/San Francisco.
You probably can’t long on to Disqus at your library because of the web activity trackers Disqus tries to use before it shows you any content. Same reason it doesn’t work if you use tracker blocking software like Privacy Badger, or if your anti-virus software on your computer or phone block invisible trackers.
Zeta’s list of acquisitions wouldn’t be of much help unless you’re familiar with the AI/Big Data/Analytics space. Buying Disqus for the user base was sort of a one-off for them.
https://www.google.com/search?q=zeta+global+acquires
Zeta’s biggest source of primary data is their corporate customers. So unless you can avoid using your identity, email or logon ID for your pharmacy, bank, ISP, airline, mobile phone or utility web sites, then they’ll potentially know who you are. And, of course, if you’re one of the 100+ million that ever had a Disqus account, then they at least have your email and IP address for one point in time.
Zeta is only one company in the customer relationship management space. If you could magically delete all of their information on you (you can’t, and they can’t), then there will still be a dozen other CRM companies doing the same thing. Facebook, Twitter and Google have their own spin on this, too.
One of Zeta’s co-founders is John Sculley of Apple. Maybe some of you oldsters remember his marketing campaign for the Macintosh computer back in 1984: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtvjbmoDx-I
I deputize you to ask them. Thanks. Pat
If we uncollapsed the document and posted it in its entirety it should be searchable with our SST search engine.
Great to hear it may be possible to obtain the old comments, for posterity’s sake if nothing else.
I’ll put my hand up as a “relatively competent computer geek” if I can be of help Colonel. Rebuilding the blog + comments may require something like exporting each post, deleting it and then re-importing a copy with the comments included. I am sure I could automate this using the archive file PavewayIV describes. It would require admin access to the blog to do this of course, so if you already have a trusted computer geek all the better.
I can’t. It has to be requested from the SST owner account’s admin page on Disqus. Nobody else has permission to access the magic export button, and Disqus will only send the email with the archive download link back to the owners account. That’s if it’s even successful on their end (questionable). Probably not worth the trouble, and no sense breaking the comment history available there now.
BTW, the comments here are appearing (to me) in flat mode sorted by time, making it difficult to follow replies. If everyone else is seeing comments this way, it’s probably because TypePad Connect (comment display) defaults that way when you turn it back on. You would want to change to ‘threaded’. TypePad describes the procedure as:
Disclaimer: I am not licensed to practice TypePad in any state.
Barbara Ann and Paveway IV. The Disqus compressed file has been requested. I will let you know when it arrives and I expect your help.
Well, that’ll teach me! Glad to help, though.