Watch Out for Ads! Disqus Comments Have Gone 'Premium'
I've always been a big advocate for Disqus as a commenting system.
I've even written blog posts about why I use it instead of native commenting systems on WordPress and Squarespace, or other comment system apps!
However, last month the company has changed their settings so that you can no longer disable advertisements for free. This means that if you DON'T want these huge ugly spammy adverts to display above or below the comments section on your blog or website, you need to sign up to their monthly 'Plus Plan' of around £8 per month.
Not cool.
I'm really disappointed about this, obviously. As a business owner myself I understand that they need to make money and this is how they have been planning to monetise their platform, but I think it is a shame that they've gone about it with these types of ads and not things that could be relevant for readers that they could still use to monetise.
Anyway, at the moment there seems to be a small loophole for 'small, personal, non-commercial' sites which means you can upgrade to the Plus Plan and remove the ads for free. You can find this option when you scroll down the plan bullet points.
However I'm not sure how they will be enforcing this as I sign up for this option without any verification process, so this probably isn't a long term solution!
If you're concerned and you want to change back to WordPress' native comment system for the time being, follow the steps in this article to do that, and check out this article for some recommendations of other comment apps for WordPress.
I'm yet to find an article on migrating old Disqus comments back to Squarespace's native comment system, but hopefully there will be some help on this soon.
