Disqus Blog
blog.disqus.com · Company blog · on HN since 2010
Disqus's engineering and company blog on scaling Django, adopting Go, HTTPS, and security incidents like a user data breach.
What HN saysHN links it as evidence that Django monoliths can scale to billions of page views, and for its data breach alert.
55HN people shared it
21linked it in comments
42stories submitted
1.2Kstory points
4 years agolast shared
2010people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Scaling Django to 8 Billion Page Views7 people · 317 points · first shared 2013 · 132 comments on HN
- 2Trying out this Go thing at Disqus4 people · 180 points · first shared 2013 · 192 comments on HN
- 3Disqus Security Alert: User Info Breach4 people · 177 points · first shared 2017 · 162 comments on HN
- 4Disqus launches new website2 people · 19 points · first shared 2013 · 9 comments on HN
- 5Making Disqus 100% HTTPS2 people · 4 points · first shared 2017 · 1 comments on HN
- 6Scaling Django to 8B page views2 people · 2 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 7Introducing houdini the new look of disqus2 people · first shared 2011
- 8Try Out the New Disqus 20121 people · 92 points · first shared 2012 · 48 comments on HN
- 9Disqus now compatible with Google AMP1 people · 82 points · first shared 2016 · 32 comments on HN
- 10The Numbers of Disqus1 people · 61 points · first shared 2011 · 12 comments on HN
- 11The new Disqus 2012: Elevating the Discussion1 people · 60 points · first shared 2012 · 55 comments on HN
- 12Making Disqus faster1 people · 41 points · first shared 2010 · 6 comments on HN
- 13Disqus launches Sponsored Comments1 people · 36 points · first shared 2014 · 45 comments on HN
- 14Disqus now integrates with Google Accounts1 people · 35 points · first shared 2011 · 5 comments on HN
- 15When does moderation become censorship?1 people · 28 points · first shared 2016 · 58 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
ddtaylor · 2018-06-09
Interesting idea to provide a discussion platform that prevents trolling and toxic discussion. What makes you different than other platforms like Disqus? They claim to be working on this:
https://blog.disqus.com/first-steps-to-curbing-toxicity
Looking forward to your response and hope the best for your product.
lazycouchpotato · 2018-03-25
Disqus isn't the best with security either.
https://blog.disqus.com/security-alert-user-info-breach
g0atbutt · 2011-02-28
Yes, he did a fantastic job. Here's a link to the Disqus blog where Chris talks about @font-face http://blog.disqus.com/post/2944356158/introducing-houdini-the-new-loo…
GiorgioG · 2018-01-02
You can scale monoliths. Twitter did it until it could retool (remember the more-or-less daily fail whale?) Disqus & Pinterest scaled django to more users than most of us will ever have.
https://blog.disqus.com/scaling-django-to-8-billion-page-views
r3bl · 2017-10-09
Yes it is. Here's the official Disqus statement: https://blog.disqus.com/security-alert-user-info-breach
According to it:
> As a precautionary measure, we are forcing the reset of passwords for all affected users. We are contacting all of the users whose information was included to inform them of the situation.
They even give a shoutout to Troy right at the end of that article.
masklinn · 2017-10-09
According to their statement[0], they have 17.5 million emails to get out. Unless they routinely send several times that volume daily, they'll have to batch the notifications over the next few days or the entire thing will get blackholed.
[0] https://blog.disqus.com/security-alert-user-info-breach
> We are currently in process of emailing all of the impacted users directly. Getting all 17.5 million emails out will take us a few days, but we wanted to get this disclosure post out as soon as possible. Additionally we've posted links to this disclosure in our publisher admin panel, user homepages, and on disqus.com.
starikovs · 2017-04-26
BTW, if I open a page from disqus.com (1) with theirs comments I don't see those strange requests but if I open a page from someone's website (2) they are there!
1: https://blog.disqus.com/how-spoilertv-built-a-community-of-120k-active…
2: http://www.thedailyreview.com/news/2017-04-26/Today%27s_Top_Stories/Vo…
dbrgn · 2017-04-22
Interesting, Domains like connect.facebook.net or rc.rlcdn.com don't show up in the Chromium network connection list, even in an anonymous session (so that all extensions are disabled).
Found this: https://blog.disqus.com/protecting-users-privacy-on-disqus My browser didn't send a DNT header with the request though. The blogpost seems to be a bit of a joke when comparing it to the list of trackers reported by pingdom.
I'll definitely look for a Disqus replacement :)
ocdtrekkie · 2017-02-22
Disqus is going to start forcing some blogs to either ad-support or get a subscription: https://blog.disqus.com/advertising-will-remain-optional-for-over-95-o…
mikeokner · 2015-06-05
I think the author gets closest to the mark in the Conclusion, but still falls short. Go is very attractive as an "upgrade" from Ruby/Python or Java. It's a good replacement for the interpreted languages when speed/performance matters and it makes the async paradigm feel much more accessible. And compared to Java, the fact that Go compiles to a native binary is a huge benefit. It's not a replacement for C or a good "teaching" language, nor would anyone call it "mature" at this point, but it does fill a niche and fills it pretty well.
http://blog.disqus.com/post/51155103801/trying-out-this-go-thing
northisup · 2014-06-01
Disqus is! http://grnh.se/vj71bo
Small problems become very interesting problems when you have the kind of scale we do. (details on scale: http://blog.disqus.com/post/62187806135/scaling-django-to-8-billion-pa…
Django/Python, Js, iOS, Designers. We are hiring them all!
rch · 2014-05-07
They had a fairly popular post on the subject a while back:
http://blog.disqus.com/post/62187806135/scaling-django-to-8-billion-pa…
In short, since they were not really pushing volume with Python, just feeding data to Varnish, throughput wasn't such a big deal.
sologoub · 2014-05-07
Disqus was originally built on Django: http://blog.disqus.com/post/62187806135/scaling-django-to-8-billion-pa…
It seems that this is what the found team was most comfortable with, so it makes sense that they proceeded to solve problems using tools they already knew well. At some point, they exhausted how far they could take their existing tools and started investing into new tools.
yareally · 2013-12-20
Python scales quite fine actually (Disqus and YouTube use it for a majority of core development). It's all about the tech behind the scenes (uWSGI, Tornado, Ngnix, memcache/redis, etc), not the language itself (just as it is with PHP). Try scaling PHP if only using Apache Prefork instead of mod worker + php-fpm or Ngnix + php-fpm and you'll see what I mean.
I have no problem with using either PHP or Python on a particular project, depending on what is involved. I wish PHP threads would show a bit more maturity/pragmatism on both sides of the aisle sometimes.
http://yougov.github.io/pycon/slides/
http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/3/26/7-years-of-youtube-scalabili…
http://www.slideshare.net/jinaljhaveri/scaling-python-webapps-from-0-t…
http://blog.disqus.com/post/62187806135/scaling-django-to-8-billion-pa…
bjt · 2013-10-03
> These frameworks simply don't scale past the size of a small project.
That is incorrect. From the Django side, see Instagram (http://instagram-engineering.tumblr.com/post/13649370142/what-powers-i… and Disqus (http://blog.disqus.com/post/62187806135/scaling-django-to-8-billion-pa…
mattrobenolt · 2013-09-25
http://blog.disqus.com/post/51155103801/trying-out-this-go-thing This has replaced that. ;)
no_l0gic · 2013-08-19
I can't find any current information about Disqus using PyPY. Do you have a link you can provide?
What I did find is current Disqus adventures in Go due to Python not being performant enough:
http://blog.disqus.com/post/51155103801/trying-out-this-go-thing
bentlegen · 2013-07-25
From the blog post: Disqus’ business now centers around new advertising built on top of content discovery. It’s the way we bring more traffic to sites using Disqus and how we’re also helping them make money from their communities.
http://blog.disqus.com/post/56451685463/our-new-site-same-steak-more-s…
danso · 2013-02-14
So this has been going on earlier than December, at least as early as October, according to this Disqus blog post (which says they started it in August):
http://blog.disqus.com/post/32684337804/expanding-promoted-discovery
So how sure is the OP that he didn't just miss the emails/announcements about it? That said, yes, those links are kind of annoying (especially when unstyled) and can clash with the content.
As much as I want to switch my blog to Octopress, at least I can have a commenting system through Wordpress.
tantalor · 2011-09-29
Disqus uses this technique to inherit the font color of the embedding page,
To accommodate this wide range of design scenarios, we decided to use our own
custom web font via @font-face instead of traditional raster-based icons. This
provides us with the flexibility of inheriting font color and size from a site’s
existing aesthetic at an incredibly small file size (5kb). Since font-faces are
vector-based, we are able to serve these icons at any size without consequence.
http://blog.disqus.com/post/2944356158/introducing-houdini-the-new-loo…
thezilch · 2013-08-27
There are plenty accounts of Go in production: (Google's dl.google.com) https://groups.google.com/d/msg/golang-nuts/BNUNbKSypE0/E4qSfpx9qI8J, (CloudFlare's Railgun) http://blog.cloudflare.com/go-at-cloudflare, (Bit.ly) http://word.bitly.com/post/29550171827/go-go-gadget, (SoundCloud) http://backstage.soundcloud.com/2012/07/go-at-soundcloud/, (Disqus's realtime-backend) http://blog.disqus.com/post/51155103801/trying-out-this-go-thing, etc