You may have noticed that the comment system has been migrated from Disqus to Remark42.
Why?
During a redesign of the site, I noticed the Disqus commenting system had stopped working, and upon further reading I discovered that Disqus had started injecting ads and selling user data, neither of which I am morally comfortable with having on my site.
I have standards, and I will continue to maintain this site ad-free and without trackers or heavy javascript.
So, I decided to take a leap and rip out Disqus with Remark42, noting that it was natively supported by my current templating engine, Hugo.
What happened to my comments?
If you have commented on this site before, firstly, thank you 😀 it means a lot to have people interested in what I do here, and it continues to surprise me that people somehow just.. find my content? not sure how..
Anyway, your existing comments have been manually migrated over from Disqus, with shadow accounts created for Remark42.
Unfortunately there’s no way to take control of these accounts or log in via your existing Disqus user, but you can continue to comment anonymously, or by creating a new account via GitHub or Email login.
Any comments you make are stored on my server, and I never see any of your personal details. (Except your email if you specify it, though I’m not exactly going to go out of my way to search through the logs!).
The biggest change is that you probably won’t get notified of replies unless you explictly subscribe with your email, so make sure to do that!
Technical details
The entire process of migrating was fairly painless, and Remark provides a good migration guide here:
https://remark42.com/docs/getting-started/installation/
https://remark42.com/docs/backup/migration/
They provide a docker image which I simply integrated into my existing Ansible workflow, deployed it to the server, and spent some time getting the configuration just right.
Enjoy!