Safari 14 introduced a new UI component that I cannot love more: a privacy report detailing all the third-party trackers blocked by WebKit’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP). Following this progress and removing Google Analytics last year, I decide to finish my part today by purging Disqus (comes with unsolicited tracking) from this website.

Privacy Report in Safari 14 showing the cross-site trackers that Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) blocked.

The process is much easier than I thought. I would recommend this to anyone who prioritizes the online privacy of the readers. The following steps should generally work for most Hugo/blogdown sites.

Set up utterances

1. Check out the utterances docs to set up a GitHub repo with the utterances app installed for storing the comments in issues. I created a dedicated new repo for this.
2. Add the utterances partial to the theme. It includes adding a partial and calling it in single.html. Here is the changeset for my current theme. Remove Disqus related variables such as disqusShortname in your site configuration file (e.g., config.toml). Set the utterances repo value if you have placed it as a .Site.Params variable, as I did in the partial template.
3. Recompile the site to see if the new system works. If it does, a GitHub issue style comment box should show up under every post.

Migrate comment data from Disqus

1. Export the previous comments data via Admin > Community > Export. An XML file tarball will be sent via email.
2. Import comments into the new system. I did this by manually posting the original comments as there were only around 30 comments. I find the R script by Maëlle Salmon and the formatting provided by Juergen Gutsch useful. By doing this, we can also verify if the utterances bot works (new issues being created and comments being posted). For a higher number of comments, it might be worthwhile to automate via the GitHub issue comments API.
3. Since everything works beautifully with the new comment system, I chose to remove my site from Disqus so that they don’t keep an obvious copy of the data.

That’s it. Now every single page on this blogdown site is tracking free. Maybe it’s the placebo effect, but I can almost feel the pages loading faster. The side effect that a GitHub identity is required for commenting is enjoyable — it might actually improve the conversation’s quality.

Unlike Orpheus, I’m never looking back.