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Comment by marrs | Hacker News Reader

Every time I use disqus I think that the site owner is being rather foolhardy, not only outsourcing a key component of his site to a 3rd party, but making Javascript a hard dependency as well.

Seems a bit naive to then blame the user for "breaking the web".

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What's the alternative? I like having Disqus since it's a decent UI and I get to host completely static sites for my blog.

So what? It should only break comments. I can see how one could see those as "optional content".

From the screenshot it looks like that's what was happening. Update: I take it back. It looks like it's doing more than that. So there's a bug in this plugin. Even so, not relying omn disqus would have avoided this issue.

Exactly - I think the sweetspot here is 'disabling disqus via Ghostery should block disqus, but not anything else' - the author of the original article appears to be arguing against the use of Ghostery altogether as a result of being burned by choosing disqus in the first place.

JS is effectively a hard dependency for the web these days.

Some devs would prefer that to be the case, but it really isn't, especially for a blog.

Not if you want to be crawled properly by Google and bing it isn't

Err, actually, the Google crawler has supported JS (in some form) for a number of years:

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/...

"in some form" hides a plethora of ways to screw your site up - just suck it up and develop so your site has a clean URL structure and is fast and easily crawlable (JS can case problems with all 3 of these key features).

Not that I consider comments a key component, but almost all sites outsource a key component to a 3rd party (hosting being a biggy.)

But in this case, the plugin was breaking his website. Not because of JavaScript or a 3rd party, but because they had a bug.

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