Further to my post explaining why I don’t like centralised comments systems such as Disqus, this blog post by Jacob Barkdull echoes some of my opinions on the service — both from a technical point of view and from the ideological standpoint that for something as critical as comments, if it’s on your website, it should be under your control.

Disqus is one central controlling entity, if Disqus decides to do “maintenance” or they begin to have server problems, everyone using Disqus comments now has not only no way visitors may leave comments, but also no way to display previously posted comments. And if worst comes to worst and Disqus disappears (as is possible with companies) everyone is left without comments, unlike if the comments are controlled by each “webmaster”.

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I find issue with the added near 4 second pause on every page just to display Disqus comments, Disqus handles this well, but not well enough in my opinion. Because when pages load with Disqus comments there appears a little “Loading…” message, that eventually gets replaced by the comments and the form to post comments, the problem with the way they do this is when you refresh the page it jolts, kicking the scroll down the length of the comments until Disqus has loaded where it then kicks the scroll back up the length of the comments.