As much as I enjoyed creating the Rock/Paper/Scissors captcha [morerpscaptcha, rpscaptchasandwich, rpscaptcha] scheme for comments on this blog, the commenting system has otherwise been fairly primitive. I've been exploring ideas for enhancing the system and including some kind of global authentication like Google Connect, Facebook Connect, or Gravatars.
But it looks like a the guys at Disqus have most of this covered, so I'm going to give their system a shot. They support their own registration system as well as Facebook Connect, so if you have a Facebook account (with 150 million users, who doesn't these days?), you can post with your existing account.
I'm using the Javascript version of Disqus for now. If it works out, I'll convert to the backend API, which might make the pages load a bit faster. I also need to take a crack at restyling their default comment thread, which I'll do when I overhaul the rest of the site.
Comments that were posted with the previous system are still visible on the blog in the "Legacy Comments" section. However, only Disqus comments are counted in the "(#) comments" link on the main page.
