Another Blogger's "Disqus Dilemma" (Guest Post!)

I run a little blog called A blog about a girl named Buttons which isn't too big and isn't really about anything in particular. I also run a 'secret' blog where I'm anonymous (and want to stay that way, so sorry.. not spilling my 'secrets!'), and with a friend I've somehow, in a span of 4 months, built a little following of tens of thousands of readers with hundreds of thousands of page views. Don't ask me how- I'm just as surprised as you are!

My "buttons" blog is run through blogger and I use wordpress for the "secret" blog, so I'm quite familiar with both. I'm always looking for cool new things to try out, and I came across two blogs (neither on blogger) using Disqus for comments. I just had to know what this new thing was, so I checked it out and fell in LOVE with the concept. From their website, "[Disqus is] connecting websites and commenters across a thriving discussion community." Um, more fun places for me to be socially and virally connected? Yes please!

So I decided to try it out on my blogspot blog first. The set-up was EASY and took a matter of minutes. I followed their instructions exactly and double-checked my work. I got all excited to try it out, and when I went to leave a comment on my latest post, nothing was different. No Disqus! Just blogger. I was bummed and assumed my lack of tech skills was the problem. After a little googling, I came across Dave's blog and realized he had a similar problem. After feeling pretty good about myself since Dave had a problem too (and he seemed pretty computer saavy), I gave up all hope of ever adding Disqus to my blogspot blog.

A few days later, I remembered that one of the instructions from Disqus was, "Go to Settings > Comments and change the Comments Default for Posts to 'New Posts Do Not Have Comments.' " Again, being the non-tech person I am, I never understood the reason for this instruction and decided to rebel and change it back to "New posts have comments." (Note: even with the "DO NOT have comments" option chosen, I was still receiving comments)

What do you know? Disqus started to work!

Of course, after all that, I hated it. Nothing against Disqus, I just decided I liked blogger's comment platform better. Now came the fun part- editing all the Disqus tags out of my html template (or "those symbols and stuff" as I like to call it). It seemed simple enough. I made sure to "expand widget templates" in my html template, opened a text editor and got rid of everything between the Disqus tags. Except that instead of removing Disqus only, it removed comments from my blog altogether. I thought, "Oh, maybe it's because of my rebellious move earlier of changing "DO NOT have comments" to "DO have comments." But no matter what I tried, removing the Disqus tags removed the commenting capability altogether.

Another quick google search later, I came across a convo someone had with "Giannii" at Disqus regarding removing it from blogger. Giannii seemed like a smart fella, so I emailed him and shared my problem. He responded quickly with instructions on how to remove Disqus from blogger. Of course they were exactly what I had already done. I e-mailed him to tell him what happened when I followed his instructions, and he asked for my edited template to take a look. I'm still awaiting a response from Giannii and expect to hear from him any day.

Fun little side note about the socially connected world we live in. After Dave asked me to guest blog about my Disqus experience, I tweeted this:

bekahdecker "Oh don't worry, I'm gonna be a guest blogger on a blog about my (bad) experience with Disqus"

I love Twitter precisely because of conversations like the following (this one started 5 minutes after my initial tweet):
danielha @bekahdecker Sorry to hear about a bad experience. I'd love to talk about it though
*danielha seems to be the originator of Disqus
bekahdecker @danielha don't worry! I think @Giannii is coming in to save the day!

danielha @bekahdecker @giannii He usually does. Thanks for the update

disqus @bekahdecker I'm on the job =) I will have an email for you by tomorrow morning.

Well, I didn't get the e-mail the next morning, but I'm sure after I tweet this blog post I will :)

I have nothing bad to say about Disqus- just their integration (and un-integration!) with blogger. I wasn't crazy about it compared to blogger's comment capability, but I'm still considering using it for the "secret" blog. Time will tell!

Previously: Dave to Disqus: HELP! and Nananana, Nananana, DISQUS, Good-bye! appeared on this blog.

Tags: Disqus, Disqus