I have just enabled Disqus commenting system. It has lots of nice features, but there are a few bugs we need to fix — that’s part of the Boole’s Rings way…

The most obvious issue is that MathJax currently doesn’t work in comments. I’m hoping that will get fixed very soon, so keep on using $\LaTeX$ in comments even if it’s not pretty for the moment.

There are a few other minor issues. Let me know if you encounter an issue, that will help us tune this new plugin.

### 9 Responses to “Disqus”

1. $\LaTeX$ is now enabled in Disqus comments!

•  Yes, evidently… would it be too much trouble to highlight the salient points in making that happen? For whatever reason my brain doesn’t seem able to compile the docs.mathjax.org, and so…

• It’s a trick found by Christian Perfect and implemented here by Sam Coskey. Here is the source code:

function typeset() {
MathJax.Hub.Queue(["Typeset",MathJax.Hub]);
}
function disqus_config() {
this.callbacks.onNewComment = [typeset];
this.callbacks.onInit = [typeset];
this.callbacks.onPaginate = [typeset];
}

• Test
$\bar{X} = \frac{x_i}{n}$

$\bar{X}$

2. The $\LaTeX$ fix appears to be broken after a recent disqus upgrade.

• Yeah, I’ve been trying to learn GreaseMonkey instead, but I just don’t understand the concurrency issues, and it doesn’t seem friendly to make everyone else modify their browsers. So far, I can get the init to run in disqus’ iframe, but that seems to finish before it inserts any comment text.

• It’s a difficult issue. My understanding is that disqus needs to provide appropriate hooks to run mathjax at the right time but they haven’t done that yet and there is no clear indication that they will. I’ve been looking for alternatives but I didn’t find anything with all the features I want. Do let me know if you find something.

• Here http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/163250 is a greasemonkey kludge that is working in my firefox right now. I don’t think it will handle new comments at submission time, or pagination, but it’s a start.

3. Disqus is now disabled since there seems to be little hope in restoring MathJax support. Unfortunately, the process of reverting to WordPress comments stripped all the backslashes from comments, breaking the math in comments all over the site. I’m working on fixing that…