Leyan made me try out Disqus for my tumblog. It’s a comment system that you can integrate with your blog, and it sucks.

First, everything is huge, which makes me feel like I’m back in 1998 on a 800×600 screen. And in between all the hugeness, there’s swaths of whitespace. There’s a reason we got higher resolution, and it wasn’t so stupid Web 2.0 sites could fill it up with 2 inch tall letters in a typeface that doesn’t benefit from increased detail. This wasted space and ugliness in itself wouldn’t be so bad, if the rest of it was intuitive and simple like Twitter. Or even if it was complicated and customizable, but with the most commonly used features easily accessed like WordPress.

But no. There’s three different tab systems at least. What exactly is the difference between home, admin, profile, and account? I have no idea. So whenever I want to access anything, I end up clicking on all of them and hope I find the setting I’m looking for, if it exists at all.

You can connect the following services with your Disqus account: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Delicious, Flickr, and Tumblr. But these aren’t the websites that you can put Disqus on. In fact, the only “connection” to these websites I see is a tiny icon on your profile page that links to them. The list of places you integrate Disqus with would be: Tumblr, Blogger, WordPress, Typepad, and Moveable Type. What’s the difference between connection and integration? They don’t explain. You have to add the sites yourself and then get frustrated when nothing shows up where you thought it would.

For each blog that you integrate Disqus with, Disqus makes a separate “community page”: blog1.disqus.com, blog2.disqus.com, etc. These are listed on, but distinct from, your Disqus profile, which is at http://disqus.com/people/username. (I think Disqus is the only modern “social networking” site that doesn’t automatically put your profile at username.domainname.com. Why?) So if you have multiple blogs under the same username like chibimagic.tumblr.com and chibimagic.wordpress.com, you’d have to use a usernameservice.disqus.com naming scheme like chibimagictumblr.disqus.com and chibimagicwordpress.disqus.com. Of course, they don’t tell you this until you try to add another blog to your profile and they tell you that the short name is already taken by your other blog. And if you mess up, you can’t delete or rename these community pages either. You’re stuck and they show up on your profile forever. But they never tell you the point of the community page, and why it’s different from your profile page, and your account page, and settings page, and home page. So maybe it’s just useless and you can ignore it and the whole poor naming scheme.

Disqus has so many other poorly thought out and confusing aspects, I just want to get rid of it and forget it ever existed. Except I can’t. Because you’re not allowed to delete your Disqus account.