Right. If you're following me on Twitter or on Facebook, you're probably already aware of a little dilemma recently: Disqus rolled out advertisements on all pages that used their comment system without notifying their users. Granted, they DID announce that move back in 2017, however they assured that as long as your site is below a certain threshold of number of visits, they wouldn't bother putting ads on it. Seems like they either changed their mind (boo!) or that I passed that threshold (Uh ... yay?).
In either case, I made it a principle of never, ever putting ads on my website. So this left me with three options: Either look for alternatives (most of which are shoddy at best and shady at worst), code my own comment system (which I already did way back when – let's just say I lacked the know-how to make it spam- and trollproof. I still don't know how to pull that off) OR, the initially least desireable option, ditch comments altogether. I chose the third option, as you might have noticed by now.
Rest assured that the decision did not come easily. I even opened polls on Twitter and Facebook (interestingly enough, the former crowd leaned towards keeping the comment system on the page whereas the latter one didn't mind me ditching it) to help me decide. Thinking on it however I came to the conclusion that a) I don't get all that many comments to begin with and b) that most interaction happens on social media anyway, so me keeping an empty comment box around not only looks kinda sad in and of itself, it also eats up a lot of space I could put to much better use, like properly informing you of the fact that I've opened a YouTube channel for livestream recordings (and maybe some other stuff further down the line, who knows …) which you can and totally should subscribe to and that you can now support me on Ko-Fi.com – but only if you want, no pressure. I do not rely on Ko-Fi money, so don't worry. It is a nice gesture though, so … yeah.
Anyways, I hope you're not too sad about the lack of comments. If you are, feel free to let me know on Twitter or Facebook, that's what those pages are for anyways. Or drop me an Email, there's a link for that below in the footer.
Thanks for understanding and don't forget to subscribe to the YouTube channel – I'm only a couple (like, 90) subs away from earning a custom URL, so every sub genuinely helps me reach that goal.
