tabs ↹ over ␣ ␣ ␣ spaces

by Jiří {x2} Činčura

Migrated from Disqus to utteranc.es

10 Mar 2021 2 mins Blog

In last 24 hours I migrated from Disqus to utteranc.es because I’m done with Disqus. I didn’t mind it initially, but last few years I was more and more unhappy about it. Here’s why and how I migrated.

The reason why I was considering migrating away was because of my feeling of Disqus becoming bloated, slow and kind of intrusive. Also, from time to time I had problems with (my) email replies (which by the way is a great feature) not showing on the web. And I hate unreliable features.

But every time I considered migrating away, I faced two problems. First, I don’t want to pay for the commenting system. I know, I’m cheap. But in defense I’m publishing technical topics mostly – there might be a one question once a month about under some topic or correction of some mistake I did, and that’s it. Paying more than a dollar or euro would be too much for me. In addition, it meant migrating the comments. And sure, some systems offer Disqus import, however I wanted to do some very small cleanup as well.

The last drop was when I found out this week, I missed few (interesting) comments from last 5 or so months. Done. I was ready.

Few months back I stumbled upon a product that was using GitHub issues as a storage and had a nice, smooth, polished execution. The problem was I forgot the name. Luckily after some googling I found it – utteranc.es.

Also, while googling I found a .NET/C# tool that processes the Disqus export file and imports it into GitHub issues to be then used by utteranc.es. With a few small tweaks I started the import – failed few times because I triggered GitHub’s abuse/rate limiting mechanisms (sorry GitHub) along with a damn Windows Update reboot during the night while the tool was slowly importing (thanks Windows Update, not) – and it was ready for switch.

Now, less than 24 hours after I angrily started, the comments below are running using utteranc.es and I’m happy.

Leave me a comment!

Profile Picture Jiří Činčura is .NET, C# and Firebird expert. He focuses on data and business layers, language constructs, parallelism, databases and performance. For almost two decades he contributes to open-source, i.e. FirebirdClient. He works as a senior software engineer for Microsoft. Frequent speaker and blogger at www.tabsoverspaces.com.