Disqus

Disqus

Type	Private
Foundation date	San Francisco, California (October 30, 2007 (2007-10-30))
Headquarters	San Francisco, California
Area served	Worldwide
Founder(s)	Daniel Ha Jason Yan
Key people	Daniel Ha (CEO) Jason Yan (CTO)
Industry	Internet
Employees	33 (2012)
Slogan(s)	"Discover your community."
Website	disqus.com
Alexa rank	297 (February 2014)[1]
Registration	Optional
Users	50 million
Available in	Multilingual
Launched	October 2007
Current status	Active

Disqus is a blog comment hosting service for websites and online communities that uses a networked platform. The company’s platform includes various features, such as social integration, social networking, user profiles, spam and moderation tools, analytics, email notifications, and mobile commenting. It was founded in 2007 by Daniel Ha and Jason Yan as a Y Combinator startup.

Disqus ranks #1 in Quantcast's U.S. networks with 144 million monthly unique U.S. visits^[2] Disqus is featured on many major publications, such as CNN, Daily Telegraph and IGN and about 750,000 blogs and websites.^[3] It competes with IntenseDebate, Livefyre and Echo.

History

Disqus was first developed in the summer of 2007 as a Y Combinator startup headed by Daniel Ha and Jason Yan, both of whom were undergraduates at University of California, Davis. Disqus was first incorporated and launched on October 30, 2007.

Financing

In early 2011, Disqus raised $10 million in funding from North Bridge Venture Partners and Union Square Venture Partners.^[4]

Growth

According to a March 2011 study by Lijit, Disqus is used by 75% of websites who use a third party commenting or discussion system.^[5]

Technology

The Disqus comment widget is written in JavaScript and is powered by a back end primarily written in Django.

Business model

Disqus operates on the freemium financial model, similar to Dropbox and Evernote. The service is free to use for both commenters and websites.

Starting in November 2010 Disqus began officially offering three add-on packages for websites: Plus for $19/month, Pro for $199/month, and VIP starting at $999/month.^[6] In mid-2011, the Plus package was removed and Pro was increased to $299/month.

Starting July 2012, Disqus offers just two premium packages, the VIP package and a Single sign on-only package for $99/month.

Functionality

Language support

Both the Disqus website and comment system were translated into more than 60 languages in 2011.^[7] With the introduction of the new Disqus in 2012, language support dropped to 7 languages^[8] and even though Disqus accept applications for new languages,^[9] only one such has been added since bringing the current number of supported languages to 8 as of 2013.

Criticism and privacy concerns

Some commentators have noted the privacy issues inherent in the use of services like Disqus, which serve their content through third party JavaScript widgets.^[10][11][12]

As with other embedded web widgets such as like buttons, the Disqus widget acts as a web bug which tracks a users activities, even when they are not logged in, across different sites that use the Disqus commenting system. Information tracked by Disqus.com, which may be disclosed to 3rd parties, includes pseudonymous analytics data such as a users IP address, their web-browser's version and installed add-ons, and their referring pages and exit links.^[13] Although this data is referred to by Disqus as "Non-Personally Identifiable Information", such data, when aggregated, has been shown to be usable for de-anonymizing users.^[11]

Users wishing to avoid these issues may opt to install a privacy-enhancing web browser extension, such as Ghostery, NoScript, or DoNotTrackPlus, which identify widgets such as Disqus as web-bugs,^[14][15] and allows them to be blocked; this renders Disqus-powered commenting sections unviewable.

Disqus has also been criticized for publishing its registered users' entire commenting histories, along with a list of connected blogs and services, on the publicly viewable user profile pages.^[16] The option to keep profile activity private was later added.

Disqus also has been criticized for not giving users control over who follows them. Any user can follow any other user, but a user being followed cannot control or block who is following them.^[17] This allows the system to easily be misused for harassment purposes.

In the event that Disqus shut down, hundreds of millions of comments would be wiped away from a wide range of sites, since by the very nature of the service, comment content is not being managed locally by sites implementing the service. However, it is possible for site admins to export all of their comments as an XML document which can then be ported into other commenting systems.^[18]

2013 security breach

In 2013 a Swedish group called Researchgruppen got hold of and exposed a large number of anonymous disqus identities through the API system. The group co-operated with the Bonnier newspaper Expressen, who subsequently visited some of the commentators in their homes, confronting them with allegedly racist, misogynic and derogatory sentiments. Researchgruppen, which include people from the far left, said their database contained millions of comments from Disqus users around the world who are at risk of de-anonymization. ^{[19] [20] [21]}

Facts

• The first employee of Disqus was Andrew Badr.

References

External links

• Official website
• Disqus at CrunchBase