Switching the commenting system

I have been using Disqus for some time since switching my blog, as it was the most common system at the time and felt like the most frequently used. However, I have noticed I don’t get a lot of engagement. None, to be precise. That could have been due to me promoting communication through other mediums (like Slack), or Disqus may not have worked for my use case. So, I started looking at others over the holiday break. When this blog was initially created, there wasn’t much in the way that didn’t require a lot of overhead (for example, WordPress Commenting when self-hosting) or options (quite literally, there were not a lot of options). Now, however, there are several:

• Giscus
• Cusdis
• opengraph
• waline
• vssue

Making the Switch

I have been using CalJimmy’s Hugo Theme Stack for this blog, with some modifications to bits and pieces of the code as well, as a layer on top of the original source.

Thankfully, the main theme already has support for Giscus, so all that is required is to set the configuration here:

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## Comments
[comments]
enabled = true
provider = "disqus"

Towards

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## Comments
[comments]
enabled = true
provider = "giscus"

Then configure the sections here:

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[comments.giscus]
repo = ""
repoID = ""
category = ""
categoryID = ""
mapping = ""
lightTheme = ""
darkTheme = ""
reactionsEnabled = 1
emitMetadata = 0

To point towards the Github Repo that will host the Discussion and Commenting System:

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[comments.giscus]
repo = "delize/andrewdoering-org-blog-discussions"
repoID = "myid"
category = "General"
categoryID = "DIC_kwDONpCPKs4Cl76R"
mapping = "title"
lightTheme = "catppuccin_latte"
darkTheme = "noborder_gray"
reactionsEnabled = 1
emitMetadata = 0

What is even better is that giscus.app makes this incredibly easy. Filing out the configuration on their main page allows you to get a sample of the information needed to configure the app and make the switch seamless, easy, and pain-free.

If we were migrating comments

Because of my lack of comments on my blog, I don’t need to worry about migrating, but it looks like someone else needed to accomplish this task 2 years ago.

When reviewing Rob Hyndman’s blog post from 2022, it appears that there is both a how to obtain the Disqus comments via XML, and a corresponding code available here.