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by brokentone 4453 days ago
A. Commenting at scale is hard. Believe me, I know. We run the largest Wordpress website out there, and decided to rewrite commenting inhouse. It's been... hard.

B. There are a handful of other good providers out there that hopefully this will give more business to.
4 comments
User8712 4453 days ago
Why is it difficult? I run a medium size website, with a custom threaded comment system. It receives 30,000 new comments a day on average. There has been zero issues, it's a simple comment table in the database with an index, and some standard queries. It's something you could literally code up in an afternoon.

Now, if you receive a hundred million comments a day, it'll be a little more complicated, but those sites are few and far between. At that point, you most likely have a budget for better hardware and specialized staff.

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larrys 4453 days ago
"We run the largest Wordpress website out there, and decided to rewrite commenting inhouse."

Can you elaborate on the reasons for doing so and what motivated that action?

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brokentone 4453 days ago
We wanted to own our data, wanted to maintain existing user accounts, don't care about federated commenting login, want to keep old comments on old stories, and didn't really feel like paying someone (or letting someone suddenly add ads to it).

Building it from scratch on top of the WP database made sense for us. The WP commenting code is some of the worst (and oldest) stuff in the entire codex.

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baby 4453 days ago
> A. Commenting at scale is hard. Believe me, I know.

Other than just believing you, what makes it hard? I've had to scale comments on some very high traffic websites and it was pretty straight forward. Unless it's a complex comment system, but then you wouldn't use Disqus anyway.

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brokentone 4453 days ago
Building an auth system, user accounts, comment submission, moderation, and threading, then rendering all of that out is more work than it seems. All of the dynamic-ish stuff (seeing your comment immediately, noting your comments) has to be carefully thought out. Right now commenting takes half our app load, and it's pretty tightly written.
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opendais 4453 days ago
What scale are you finding it difficult at?

I'm pretty sure the first poster was thinking more along the lines of an official company blog, not a major website.

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