Your users deserve better than Disqus

Ok, sure. I don't want to use disqus. Just one question.

What alternative do I have?

I can't afford to spend a lot of money. It's pointless to develop a comment system myself when it's a problem that has already been solved. Just the spam solution alone is a monstrous task.

I'll gladly not use Disqus if you offer one reasonable alternative.

The points the author makes about the inherit risks of tying yourself to a third party service apply beyond Disqus - I think it's reasonable to expect any such service to become more intrusive in terms of tracking and attempting to monetize your users as it becomes more popular. Although the jab at PHP is expected coming from a Perl site, it's also irrelevant.

I'm not aware of an open source solution for commenting which would be as easy to deploy as Disqus, and of course this is why such services are popular. A commenting system is in essence a fully realized CRUD application with user validation and everything, probably sitting inside of another one. I suppose you could just use Wordpress or something, though.

As far as I'm concerned, for comments, you either have a form for screen name and email, or you use Disqus. Facebook comments is not a good alternative. Other alternatives do not yet have as wide adoption as I would like.