[simanyay]

Things like HackerNews, Reddit, GitHub and Disqus are more useful to everyone using them when they are provided as a hosted service and not a deployable software.

We give site owners a hassle-free discussion platform that can be integrated into their websites with additional perks such as moderation tools, analytics, spam filters (trained on the whole network of websites and not just one) and others.

And people leaving comments on different websites are now able to manage and control their comments across the web, and use their Twitter/Facebook/Google accounts knowing that Disqus will never abuse their trust. Boxed software installed on different sites managed by different people would likely never be able to provide neither the integration nor the trust.

But don't get me wrong, we absolutely love open source. Check out our Code page[1] or our public account on GitHub[2]. We released many different projects, some of which are adored by the Python/Django community (e.g. Django Sentry). I think Disqus as a product is better when it is a service and not a boxed software.

Anton

[1] — http://code.disqus.com/code/ [2] — https://github.com/disqus/

[sixcorners]

I'm just saying that your software can be both. None of the things you listed seem like they preclude Disqus from being open source. Here is a wordpress plugin that allows visitors to comment using their whatever account. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/social-connect/

Also.. uh.. This is kind of unrelated but you kind of abused my trust. I wanted to post an anonymous comment and thought I needed to provide an account for spam reasons, so I logged in, left my username blank, and it automatically put my first name in as the author of the post. I have tried to avoid your stuff since. I think other people were posting things anonymously so it might have just been my fault. Still though, I'm done with it.

[simanyay]

You don't need to log in to post anonymously. Sites, however, can disable anonymous posting if they wish to do so.

[sixcorners]

And I suppose you don't give give your email when you want to post anonymously even it says it won't be published? That's what Wordpress does by default isn't it? I think that's what Disqus also does but it isn't clear. You don't divulge people's information without explicit authorization. Filling in the name field for me is not good. Maybe anonymous is the wrong word. I didn't want my stuff published for the world to see.

Now that I go back to it, I see that it links to my twitter account and provides my first name. I was thinking that just showing my first name would only be kind of bad, turns out I was remembering it incorrectly. It is as bad as I thought it was.