[WorldMaker]

My blog dates back in some fashion or another to some point in the 1990s and before the word "blog". It's been through so many different technologies. The only "off-the-shelf" one used Drupal for a few years. Most of the rest were bespoke. Many versions and archives have since been lost though I've tried to keep continuity where I can (the current blog has some URL redirects all the way back from the second version on Drupal after the last major loss of archives).

When going bespoke again after Drupal I decided to outsource comments (to Disqus) knowing full well from previous versions the spam problems and the tools to fight it. That was for a Python/Django blog engine I wrote and used for a few years. I've since moved to an SSG (Jekyll for ease of Github-automated build process; maybe I'll revisit now that Github Actions exist).

A few years back I decided to eliminate all trackers and deeply audit third party JS code on my blog. Disqus of course did not pass the bar I set for myself (and my current feelings about privacy and ad tracking) and I thought I'd replace it with something bespoke maybe, put up a "temporary" warning that comments are currently gone, but I just haven't and I haven't really felt much pressure to. At this point I'm not sure if I should. I miss comments some, but the heyday for comments on my blog was during college (in "the Google Reader era") and was never quite the same since.

I still have the dump of Disqus comments and there are at least a few historic discussions in there (some of which themselves were migrated out of Drupal back in the day) I keep thinking of trying to repost them somehow on the relevant posts, but keep procrastinating that idea as well, in part because I don't know if/how I will turn comments back on in general. I'm not sure if I even need to at this point. I keep wondering if I miss comments only for nostalgia's sake and that era is now so far in the past anyway that there isn't much to gain in the current era with comments on blog posts.