Update: our new commenting system
January 28, 2021 by ZippyImage Staff
As of today we have released our new commenting system. This replaces Disqus for all content on ZippyImage.
When we first launched ZippyImage, we used Disqus (a 3rd-party commenting service) to save time. Disqus has a few drawbacks -- it requires a separate login to post comments, it doesn't fully integrate with the other features of our website, and we don't have any control over how the actual data is stored or handled. On the other hand, Disqus is pretty well known and using it saved us a whole chunk of development work, allowing us to launch ZippyImage faster. At the time, we felt the trade-off was worth it.
Unfortunately, we very soon found ourselves "in trouble" with Disqus. They use advertising to pay the cost of their service, but since we do allow some adult content on ZippyImage, Disqus notified us that they did not want to do business with us. (Because they could not run ads on sites with adult content.) To their credit, they didn't shut us off immediately, so we actually had plenty of time to finally develop our own replacement commenting system.
The new system is fully integrated with ZippyImage and we will be testing out new features with it as we go into the future. (For example -- to encourage a friendly community, there are no downvote buttons on images anywhere on ZippyImage, but we are now experimenting with like/dislike buttons on comments only. Hopefully it will not be abused, or we will rethink it.)
We also migrated all comments that had previously been posted via Disqus into our new system. Unfortunately Disqus doesn't allow us to see the comment poster's full email address, so we had no way to match Disqus comments with the corresponding ZippyImage user accounts. Therefore you'll see any comments from Disqus simply say they were posted by "Guest" under the new system. We're sorry about that, but any comments you post going forward will be correctly attributed to your user account. (Don't worry, your email address will never be shared publicly. We only link to your ZippyImage public profile page.)
We hope you enjoy the new comment system -- now go out there and have some interesting conversations!
What do you think?
Comments (1)
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