Disabling Disqus comments

Last week, starting with the release of Home Assistant 0.62, we switched to using our community forums for comments on our blog posts. By doing so, people are able to use their existing Home Assistant community accounts to comment on our blog posts and engage with one another. It has been easier for our users to stay in the loop with one less channel to keep track off.

Previously, we were using the free version of Disqus to power comments on our blog. After the switch, to preserve the old comments, we decided to keep Disqus active on the older blog post pages. However, today we decided to turn them off.

Today Disqus changed their advertisement strategy and turned on irrelevant graphical advertisement above and below the comment thread (screenshot). On a phone, it took so much screen real estate that it filled the whole page with an advertisement for weight loss milk. Previously, Disqus had advertisements in an unobtrusive way: showing suggested content a visitor might also be interesed in.

Today we have switched all blog posts to the new commenting system and are no longer serving Disqus comments. We are exploring ways to restore the old comments.