Back to blog
As a developer it's always nice to use plugins that enhance your website/apps and help to reduce development time... One downside to using these 3rd party modules is that they are always changing and often give you little notice when they do.
Disqus comments is one of those great 3rd party plugins that adds high quality commenting functionality to your blog or latest news sections... That was until today when I logged in and noticed that links to 'sponsored' websites were being placed above or below the comments module. (see screenshot below)
At first I freaked out and started to think "how many client websites have I installed this on" and what can I replace it with...? After the initial panic I thought that maybe I should log on to Disqus and see if I can disable these ads some how...
After a few minutes of fumbling through their settings I found a tab called "Discovery". Apparently this feature is designed to "Increase your traffic and make money from your website's engagement with the new Discovery box."... Now I'm sure this is great if your trying to monetize your web traffic... But if you run a standard website where you would rather keep your website visitors on your website so you can try and sell them your products and services this is not an ideal thing to see displayed at the end of your articles.
Don't get me wrong, I'm generally all for monetizing content… but it would have been nice to be informed about these changes before they were implemented. I was very close to replacing the Disqus comments module with something else such as Facebook comments.
How to remove "Discovery" ads from Disqus:
- Log in to disqus.com
- Select Admin
- Click on the Settings Tab and choose a profile
- Now select the tab called "Discovery"
- Change the "Choose your Discovery level" to Just Comments.
- Presto… no more sponsored links!
I don't really see how these posts/ads could actually increase traffic to anyone's website by leaving them enabled. It looks more like your average Pay Per Click model so I'm assuming in order to get your website listed in the Disqus suggest posts you have to pay.
But as you can see below it works... no sponsored links! YAY... Feel free to leave a spam comment below :)