If it only went down for about an hour during this whole time, then that's not really much of an argument for moving away from this type of service, because that is really excellent uptime.

But it doesn't seem ideal or really necessary for everyone to rely on one company for blog comments or for searches/advertising or anything.

IMO, Disqus is great for adding discussion to pages which don't have a built in commenting system; for example a single page which shows some demo of code.

But for my wordpress blog, I prefer native comments as it removes the dependency to a third party service

The Disqus plugin for WordPress can sync comments to your database. That way you still have your comments if Disqus goes down, or you decide not to use it. I still go with native because I prefer the way it looks. :)

Hmm. Is the Disqus plugin capable of automatically falling back to native Wordpress commenting in the case of Disqus down? If so, the authors need not panic even if Disqus down.

that seems like something you can easily implement on your end, not the disqus end.

You can disable the plugin if Disqus goes down long enough to matter and resync later.

Agreed. It's a simple task from my end to disable the Disqus plug-in during the downtime.

But what if the service goes down during the night time where I might not be able to immediately login to my wordpress and disable the Disqus plug-in until next morning?

Wouldn't be nice if the plug-in automatically takes care of itself, rather than manual intervention?

How good is the Wordpress COmmenting system - Intensedebate?

I have no issues with the native WP comments. Plus, there are plugins that change their behavior.

Specific ones you might recommend? I'd be happy to hear some options worth considering.

While it's fun to point out downtime of hosted services, you have to balance it against downtime you'd have had if you hosted the service yourself. I've found non-critical services I administer and host myself always suffer worse downtime than those I outsource to a service.

Bit of a link-bait title. I'd wager that the majority of blogs DON'T use Disqus, so saying it leaves 'All blogs comment-less' is a bit much.

I think it was pretty clear given the context that "All Blogs" meant "All Blogs using Disqus", and even an appropriate abbreviation.

Though it's not semantically correct, it shows how big portion of the service the downtime affects. Took 1ms of cognitive power.

I thought the web was meant to be distributed so why everyone is using centralized service like disqus and megaupload ?

It depends on what you consider distributed vs. centralized. A blog that hosts its own commenting system has centralized everything onto its own server. By partitioning the content from the comments, you are decentralizing the various pieces that make up the site.

To truly decentralize things you could open up a web hosting and commenting system to anybody who participates. A user's web browser connects to your DNS servers and, a la BitTorrent, requests seeds of third-party services which hold the content. The browser establishes a quorum of servers which have responded with an identical hash of the contents. The content may be static or it may consist of references to other pieces of content which is similarly distributed, so the browser should recursively go through each piece and gather them up in a similar manner.

You end up with a much slower web implementation, but it becomes fully distributed.

There are advantages, for example having one login for all your comments, better spam control, getter following of comments and stories you have contributed to.

Still, I am not a fan.

because centralisation centralises money too :)

And this is the only response in the thread worth discussing.

More like having the freedom to be distributed when it makes sense to do so.

Disqus is down?! Great - it's time to browse some blogs!

I would like a real-time commenting system like what Google+ has. I actually think it leads to higher engagement. If Google decided to make it as a WP plugin, it would probably become more popular than Facebook's commenting system at least.

livefyre does that. If you go to TalkingPointsMemo.com and check out their comment section you can see it in action.

In my opinion it is a little messy only because when you load a page only the top few comments load, but as you scroll down to read more comments, comments that are replies to earlier comments start popping up, and it gets a bit overwhelming trying to follow a comment thread.

I like the idea, I jut think the execution need work.

The interesting bit for me was the "everything ok" status page.

I wonder if any services run their own monitoring system live into their status page? (and uptime stats). If not, I guess the status page is less urgent than "fixing the problem", so is likely to never be updated?

Blog comments gone?

"And nothing of value was lost."

I've seen comments far better than the original article they respond to.

I think it would be fair to say the lions share of comments are not as valuable as the original article. Youtube comments are a perfect example of this.

Disqus creeps me out anyway. I don't like any site that tracks you where ever you go.

It is back to online now.