How Disqus forced me to change URLs on CodePruner.com

When I started that blog I had created an account on Disqus to have a nice communication with you. It was easy to add, but it didn’t work as it should. I was so irritated, that I wanted to throw it away. But here is a short story about.

Adding disqus to GoHugo

Added Disqus to a blog is was easy. I just added a shortcode to GoHugo configuration and it started working. It looks like:

[services.disqus]
shortname = 'codepruner-com'

or

disqusShortname = "codepruner-com"

in older version.

But I had problem with…

Comments duplication

I noticed that the same comments are displayed on multiple pages. I know it can be useful in same cases, eg. when you have the same post with multiple addresses. Unfortunately it wasn’t my case. I was able to see the same comments on different posts. So articles about Blazor were the same comments as article about Semantic Kernel and vice versa. It was irritating for me and for you. I started digging.

I had three thoughts about it:

1. I did something wrong during the configuration, so I should check it.
2. I want to write new articles to the blog, not fight with comments!
3. I don’t want to fight with tools

The investigation and the issue

I started the investigation from my blog configuration.

• I checked Disqus shortcode.
• I compared the configuration with GoHugo documentation.
• I check the generated pages and compared it to different blogs with Disqus.

There were nothing wrong! Comments were still duplicated….

I didn’t stop my analyzing and I have found and an information that every post should have defined this.identifier and this.url in Disqus initialization script. I was very happy when I discovered that GoHugo supports it. So I have created a bit of code to add disqus_identifier, disqus_url, disqus_title to FrontMatter for every post. Then I noticed that correct values were added to pages like:

  this.page.identifier="how-to-run-blazor-wasm-app-in-container";
  this.page.title="How to run blazor app in docker container";
  this.page.url="https://codepruner.com/post/2023/2023-09-02-how-to-run-blazor-wasm-app-in-container/"

… but it didn’t help, and comments were still duplicated….

I went deeper, and analyzed it. Disqus creates new thread when you comment field is rendered for the 1st time. Then thread is created. It has assigned Link value, with an address to page with comments. So far, everything makes sense, but I had no idea why Disqus cut my URL https://codeprucer.com/post/2022. Then every post with the same the beginning of URL was assigned with the same thread.

YEY! I found the issue. Now, I just inform Disqus support about that issue and wait for the solution, right?

Disqus support answer

No, they didn’t help me. They said me:

• I have to set this.identifier and this.url. - I did it, and it didn’t help.
• I have to update the Link to a correct one with Url Migration Tool. - I understand, I can do it once, but I don’t want to do it every time after publishing a new post. I want to focus on writing new articles, not fighting with comments.
• I have to clean Identifiers for every Thread every time after publish new post. - The same as above, I can, but I don’t.

They didn’t help me, but I have found a workaround.

The real solution (workaround)

I had urls like: https://codepruner.com/post/2023/2023-09-02-how-to-run-blazor-wasm-app-in-container/ https://codepruner.com/post/2023/2023-10-11-six-things-you-must-know-before-you-start-using-openai-chatgpt/

but all of them were recognized as https://codeprucer.com/post/2023 by Disqus. It looks that Disqus cuts the url after 3rd /. I can’t see any sense with that, but maybe it is good idea to remove dated from url to make them easer to read.

So I decided to simplify URLs and remove date from them. I did it and it looks that now, Disqus can handle it.

Moreover I wrote a bit of code to update FrontMatter in all my posts to keep the old URLs working. Now you can find the solution in CodePruner’s GitHub repository .

Alternatives

If you had similar issue like me, but you don’t want to change your URLs, you can try to use different comment service. If I decided to change I would select one of listed below:

• FastComments - It looks nice, I would need to compare it with Hyvor
• Hyvor - It also looks nice, I would need to compare it with FastComments

Moreover, https://commento.io/ looks really nice, but their support doesn’t work, because they didn’t answer on my email with a simple question and they did last change in their GitHub 2 years ago.

Summary

Did you have the same adventure with Disqus? Can you suggest any comment tool for static blogs?

Just leave a comment. :)