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An experiment: Using Discourse for comments and forum

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A few years ago, I switched from using WordPress comments to Disqus. The reason behind that choice was that BlenderNation is receiving quite a bit of traffic and I need to add a few layers of caching to make it work on my server. Having users sign in breaks that caching and melts my server.

Disqus seemed like a good solution and it worked well for a while. I'm seeing more and more users having issues with it though (ranging from privacy concerns to Disqus simply not loading), and as a result, the conversation on BlenderNation has been slowing down.

I think this is a real waste so I've been looking for other solutions. In addition, I wanted to add a small forum to the site to allow for some 'meta conversation' and to connect more to my readers.

I've worked with the open-source Discourse forum/commenting software for a while now for some clients and I really like it: it's a modern forum, very fast and easy to use and it really encourages conversations.

Discourse allows comment embedding similar to Disqus, and it really ties the blog and the forum together.

As of today, I'm going to do an experiment - instead of using Disqus, all new posts will be using Discourse for their comments. Please try it a bit and let me know how you like it in a comment below.

You're also welcome to come over to http://community.blendernation.com/ of course.

You will need to set up a new account - but unlike Disqus you now know where your data is and I think you can trust by now that I won't abuse your information.

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

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