A reader emailed me to say the Duoshuo comment system on my blog seemed to be down, so we had to fall back to email. I opened the site and checked for myself, and sure enough, something was wrong.

I’ve gone through a few stages with blog comments over the years: using the default WordPress comment system, building my own comment component, and later handing the job over to Duoshuo. In general, letting someone else maintain that kind of service does make life easier. Duoshuo was a free social commenting platform, and from the shape of its API, it always felt fairly close to DISQUS. It would not be surprising if some of its design ideas were influenced by DISQUS.

I used to be a DISQUS user. Even though access from China could be slow at times, or blocked outright, the overall experience was very good. One detail I especially liked was the slide-out panel showing comment history—it felt polished and smooth.

Duoshuo’s official account had already posted notices about the issue. One of them said:

[Outage Notice] Due to a network failure in the data center today, we are investigating the problem. Some users may be affected. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Another said:

[Service Maintenance Notice] To improve overall service quality, Duoshuo will undergo upgrade maintenance from 00:00 to 06:00 on Tuesday, September 15. Service will be interrupted during that period. We apologize for the inconvenience.

The problem, though, was that things were not resolved quickly enough.

That naturally led to a lot of frustration from users. To be fair, it was a free tool, and outages do happen. If the team was actively trying to repair it, that part was understandable. Still, with that in mind, I decided to move my own blog back to my old choice: DISQUS.

Compared with Duoshuo, DISQUS has two issues that can be genuinely annoying.

• Some users are not very comfortable with English, so configuration, troubleshooting, or even reading the DISQUS help documentation can be a headache.
• DISQUS is an overseas service, so it may load slowly in China, and at times it can be blocked altogether. It also likely does not have the same level of local CDN support there.

Even so, its strengths are hard to ignore.

• DISQUS has clearly invested much more in both engineering and documentation. The surrounding ecosystem is also more mature, with forums and community spaces already in place.
• The API is much more capable. A developer can almost treat DISQUS purely as a comment database and handle create, read, update, and delete operations from the frontend. One practical idea is this: if some users in China cannot reliably reach DISQUS directly, its API could be wrapped into a package and run through the backend server instead. That adds some complexity, but it is still a workable solution.
• The user experience is simply better. In terms of polish and interaction design, Duoshuo still felt noticeably behind its foreign counterpart.
• ...

I also noticed that the Duoshuo team has been hiring, which suggests they may have been short on people for quite a while.

Hopefully they can get the support they need.