David Frey asked his Twitter followers a question this morning:

QUESTION: I'm building a new blog. Should I use a commenting system like Disqus or Facebook comments? What say you?

I'd been thinking of blogging on the subject, so I guess today's the day.

I, for one, don't like third party comment systems, for a variety of reasons.

Logging in to comment requires my browser to accept third-party cookies.

Whenever I try to comment on a blog that uses Disqus, I see an error message telling me that a browser configuration setting prevents me from logging in. The setting is a cookie control setting that prevents things like images and scripts loaded from third party sites from setting or accessing cookies.

Web standards recommend that browsers block third-party cookies by default, but most browsers have ignored that recommendation. For privacy purposes, I've changed the setting and blocked third-party cookies in my browser. And I don't like having to change my browser preferences every time I want to comment.

Some systems allow you to post "as a guest" if you're not logged in, which gets around this problem.

Disqus (and perhaps others) don't link to commenter's sites.

While it may look to you like you got a link in return for your comment, if you view the source code of the page, you'll see that Disqus is using some fancy tricks behind the scenes to fool you.

Some people like this and others don't. It prevents PageRank from "leaking" from your site through your comments. But it violates the blogging ethos by breaking one of the connections between sites that blogging and commenting creates.

To a degree, I can see the argument for not linking to comments, because comments don't trade the outbound link for an inbound one. But Disqus also doesn't creates links for pingbacks to sites that link to the blog. It takes the inbound link, gets "social proof" by displaying it, but doesn't give a search engine visible link back.

Reader Comment:
Noah said:
The ads on Disqus is what's pushing me to want to get rid of it. I was just wondering if it will affect my traffic if I removed it now. I've had it on the site for about 2 years.
(join the conversation below)

In a word, it's selfish. That's not what blogging is about.

It creates a potential point of failure.

Third party commenting systems go down from time to time. When they do, comments may be lost, or at least prevented. And depending on how the system is implemented, sites that use the system may be slowed down significantly.

By hosting your own comments, your site is vulnerable to failure from one less place.

I'm sure there are benefits to using third-party commenting systems -- perhaps even big enough benefits that I should give in and make the switch.

But I don't like them. I prefer blogs that don't use them. And I have no plans to use them myself.

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