Whoops, sorry meme mappers for having it for a week

Hey there, I just wanted to share that I found out that Disqus (the blog comment tool I was using for the past week) had a bunch of trackers on it. While I understand that some companies need or want to have trackers to help offset the cost of business I feel the practices of Disqus are bit obscene. Their chat post software had 28 trackers that I noticed and they wanted to charge me the privilage of tracking the users on Famous Meme Maps while also not giving any of the data back to me to at least be useful for my efforts. I feel that a couple trackers to help offset server costs might be an acceptable means of gaining some insights and profit from your site, but it's not something that should be taken to such an extreme and without being explicit to the users who are forfeiting their privacy when viewing blogs. Disqus had their hands too far into the cookie jar and this behaviour should not be tolerated by anyone so I felt the need to put them on blast!

So I've gotten rid of Disqus and included an open source alternative that was just as easy and quick to setup called Cusdis. Good news is they don't have any trackers like Disqus does, but they also don't have spam filtering and other advanced features that Disqus has. Since Cusdis is open source I'll likely put in a feature request to have some reactions for people to interact with articles without having to write too much. I think that was a nice feature of Disqus, but not worth the integrity of the the site and community I want to grow, Famous Meme Maps. I just wanted to share this with you guys to reiterate why it's important to have add-ons or security minded browsers that help prevent the tracking online. In a previous blog post I highlighted some browser add-ons to have to help mitigate tracking, and I'll double down on that sentiment. Even from sites with brand recognition like Disqus, it can be a good idea to have extra dilligence to keep the extra fluff out of your life. I'm lucky I found an open-source alternative that is just as easy to implement as Disqus but keeps user privacy as a core tenet of their operations.

In closing here's a picture of how I noticed the trackers, it was because of Ghostery showing the number of trackers that it blocks when loading an untrusted site (of which I hadn't set the site to trusted yet). Have a nice day!