Disqus had an outage this morning that lasted over 30 minutes. Sorry about that. Here’s what happened:

Our proxy server’s network was taken down by an automated system that detected DDoS. Translation: a machine that is especially important to the service was taken offline because some software thought there was an attack on the network (distributed denial of service).

Our hosting provider let us know that this was a mistake. There was no attack and the automated software should not have taken the machine offline. After a bit of confusion, everything was properly restored.

The main lesson for us here is that, regardless of the reason, mishaps are mishaps, and an important machine shouldn’t cause an outage in the service. We understand that. This is actually happening at a time when we are making large moves around redundancy and eliminating single points of failure. This basically means that we are making sure something like this, while it could happen again, won’t impact the reliability and performance of the service.

We always update our Twitter account on the latest happenings; follow us at twitter.com/disqus

Where did you grow up?

I’m originally from Oregon, I was born in a little town south of Oregon called Corvallis.

What did you dream of becoming as a kid?

I’ve honestly dreamed of becoming a musician since I was five years old. When I was five years old I started playing drums and I’ve never really wanted to do anything but that. Much to my dad’s dismay they wanted me to play piano and even bought a piano for the house but I would just bang on it. I was kind of a one track minded kid. One day when I was ten I came home and wanted to play the piano and my dad just about shot himself in the face.

Did you actually play drums or pots and pans?

Yeah, I started with pots and pans. Both of my parents were professional musicians and there was always band gear setup in some part of our house. I think I got started on their drummers drums in our basement but eventually they got tired of buying new kitchen equipment and bought me a drum set.

What kind of instruments do your parents play?

My dad is a bass guitar, accordion, and pedal steel player, lots of blue grass instruments. My mom is an incredible singer and in her younger years she was a drummer. I think it was sort of hereditary that I became a percussionist.

What was your first real step into the music industry?

I played professionally in bands since I was about thirteen years old. So I guess on a regional level I was making money at it since I was thirteen. My dad would take me to the gigs and of course they were all twenty one and over gigs. During the breaks I would have to leave the building because it was illegal. While waiting for the breaks to be over my dad would take me outside and we would eat burgers on the his hood of his car. When I graduated from high school I went on tours with several bands playing rock shows and arenas. After that I moved to Los Angeles from Oregon for the specific purpose of getting into film. I’ve always been a huge fan of film music.

My first real job in television was being the principal composer for Monday Night Football during the 2002-2004 seasons on ABC Sports. That was a huge break because I got acquainted very quickly with how to write for television and to turn it around in days. So that was really where I really cut my teeth. I began to do more production work after that composing music for Entertainment Tonight and several other sports shows. I did a lot of stuff like that when starting out and it really helped me hone my productions skills.

What’s the most memorable score that you’ve composed?

It seems like your favorites are always the most recent, I just finished a movie score called “The Way Home” and I had a great orchestra performing the music. That was a ton of fun. I was commissioned by the Olympic Committee to create themes for the US Olympic Swim Team during Michael Phelps gold medal run. I did a number of themes for the telecast last year and those were a lot of tough nights of writing because we kept winning. It was a great honor to be able to do something for the Olympics. When I was a kid John Williams themes were off the charts.

I’m also a studio drummer playing for several artists including Tina Tuner, Chris Cornell, and Kenny Loggins. I’ve just had the opportunity to do some really fun stuff.

Where did you hear about Disqus?

We built our blog for ScoreCast and at the time we used the blogger comment system. One of our readers said “Your guys comments suck, we can’t figure out how to login etc”. We basically said “tell us what we don’t know” and someone mentioned Disqus. Our webguy Jai Meghan looked into it and Disqus was the most clearly outline format as far as people being able to find stuff and getting registered with our community. The community page is great page as we’re a community of composers, orchestrators, contractors, and musical players. That’s really what Scorecast is about building community and trying to get the community to grow smaller as it get larger if that makes any sense. Disqus has really helped us do that.

What’s Scorecast Online?

Scorecast started in 2006 with my assistant. I would receive emails from aspiring film composers asking questions “How do I make the transition into film music?” and instead of trying to email all these people back getting bogged down with that, I started doing the podcast.

Someone wrote to me from NYU considering  our podcast as recommended listening resource for students. I realized that I needed to stop goofing off and get serious. I asked my friend Lee Sanders that does all the music for the Amazing Race if he would help out and we created Scorecast Online. We call it the virtual hangout for the musical creative. Basically we have a team of twenty five musical composers that write articles daily. It’s kind of a electronic news paper by people in the industry. It’s not really a fan sites but a resource if you’re really serious about getting into the film music.

What’s your favorite Disqus feature?

I really dig the Facebook Connect as I’m a big Facebooker. I appreciate not having to have eighty diffetent screenames to gain access. Just being able to login with my Facebook account and having everything integrated is nice. I really like how clean your system is.

If you could add anything to Disqus, what would you add?

I can’t think of anything I would add to the Disqus system.

When is the last time you composed music for yourself?

Oh man, that’s a sore subject. I don’t get the chance to do that quite a bit as most of what I do is written to picture. For the first time in a very long time I was commissioned to write a symphony and it’s a charity based thing to raise some money for kids in the town where I grew up in Oregon. I’m excited about that as I’ve not written anything independent of film in eight years. This will be an interesting exercise in freedom.

To learn more about Deane visit his twitter, website or Disqus Profile.

What do you do for a living?

My twin brother and I founded Wolfire Games, an independent video game studio. We’ve been working hard for the past year along with three other guys to build Overgrowth — the ninja rabbit fighting game.

What type of audience would overgrowth appeal too?

Overgrowth is a pretty unique game. At its core, it is about free movement and fighting. You can play it carefully, sneaking around and carefully breaking people’s spines by slamming them into the ground from behind. Or you can just run into the fray and just brawl with as many guys as you can take. There are not very many controls, but you can improvise awesome moves, for example, jumping over someone’s head and kicking them into a group of enemy wolves, causing them to get knocked into sharp rocks.

I think fans of violent, action games will have a great time with Overgrowth. Squeamish people, not so much.

How long did Overgrowth take to develop compared to your other titles?

We’re approaching the one year mark of five dedicated guys working full time on it. We also have a number of amazing contributors, for instance, Ryan Gordon working on the Linux build, and Mikko Tarmia working on music for us. We’re taking it really seriously.

Lugaru, on the other hand, was built in maybe a couple summers, single-handedly by my brother during high school.

What engine does your game run on?

We are very proud that we’ve built our own engine from the ground up — we call it the Phoenix Engine. It’s a huge, huge investment of resources to do this and the vast majority of games use a pre-built game engine.

The advantage of our engine is that we can custom tailor everything for Overgrowth. Overgrowth is truly built from the ground up to be a ninja rabbit fighting game. Everything about the procedural animation system to the map editor has been tailored specifically for Overgrowth, and I hope that this will show in the final game.

What inspired you to create a game company? Was it from just being a gamer or some other influence?

My twin brother and I have been interested in video games since before I can remember. We’ve been interested in making games pretty much since we started playing them. When we were maybe seven years old, we actually mailed a letter to Lucas Arts, the creators of Monkey Island, asking if we could work on video games for them. They respectfully declined — but we were determined.

My brother is kind of a programming natural and actually started making video games, really, really early. He started making HyperCard games in maybe second grade, then moved on to BASIC games, and then progressed to full fledged, 3D games in high school. After he graduated college, we decided to make Wolfire official and start seriously developing games.

How many games has Wolfire released?

Overgrowth will technically be the 5th game, however, it will be Wolfire’s first “serious” game. The level of technology, quality, and the sheer amount of time and effort we are putting into Overgrowth dwarfs all of Wolfire’s other games combined.

When did you first hear about Disqus?

I heard about it right when you guys were getting started from my roommate who went to highschool with the founders. I finally got around to installing it on the Wolfire Blog and I was extremely impressed.

What’s your favorite feature within Disqus?

The most valuable to me is the threading and organization of the comments.  That has transformed the comment section of our daily blog from an unreadable mess into awesome conversations, where 100 comments is not unusual.

My favorite feature is probably Facebook Connect. Its awesome for Facebook users to not even have to sign in. I don’t really know how they do it but if you click the Facebook button, it just works!

If you could add one feature to Disqus, what would it be?

I think the next step is smart social media reactions. My dream feature would be to have Reddit, Digg, Facebook, and Twitter buttons at the top of the comments so that people could Digg, Tweet, etc. my blog posts without leaving the page, and with the click of a single disclosure triangle, could view the comments from Reddit, or people’s tweets, without them mixing in with my blog comments.

After Overgrowth is released, are there any other big titles planned?

For sure! We haven’t announced anything yet, but we have a ton of awesome game ideas brewing. Overgrowth is just the beginning.

What are you thoughts about computer games vs console games?

I own all three of the current gen consoles, so I’m a huge fan. While I love to play multiplayer games like Little Big Planet and Super Smash Brothers with my buddies on the console, ultimately I would never trade PC gaming for it.

The PC is a much more open platform — companies like Wolfire would not exist without it. The only games you’d ever see would be hand picked by Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft.

With that said, consoles are looking really nice from a developers perspective. It kind of sucks when you make a PC game and upwards of 90% of your downloads come from pirates. Most indie developers who have made it onto the consoles report that their game had much, much higher sales than on PC. It’s really hard to ignore that.

I think there is definitely room for all platforms. We support everything we can, including Mac and Linux. If Sony, Nintendo, or Microsoft let us on their platform, that would be very interesting.

Besides making games, what else are you passionate about?

I love all types of biking and probably bike around Berkeley more than I walk. I’m a pretty hardcore nerd and love all kinds of technology and the startup culture in general.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

One cool thing about our game engine is that we’ve embedded WebKit thanks to the Awesomium library. This means that all of the user interface elements you see in the game are created with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

In other words, don’t be surprised if you stumble across Disqus comments while you are playing Overgrowth.

If you would like to learn more about Jeff and his game company Wolfire visit their twitter, website, or Disqus Profile.

Each and every language translated on the Disqus comment system has been done by our users. We’ve added support for several new languages and we have a few more on the way:

• Slovak
• Chinese (simplified)
• Vietnamese
• Romanian
• Indonesian
• Swedish
• Spanish (Argentinean)

Huge thanks to all our translators!

In this round: Branorac, Mu Yufan, Xoai, Svoinea, Omericit, Guhpraset, jardenberg, HenrikAI, Jonas Alvunger, Chokladkakan, and Juarez Polanco.

To change the language for your Disqus comments just visit your settings page and choose it from the drop-down. If you’d like to volunteer to help us translate, email translation@disqus.com. We are always looking to support more languages!

This past Friday, the folks from fellow comment system provider, JS-Kit, announced dramatically that “[blog] comments are dead.”

It’s a catchy platitude and one that surely was not meant to be taken literally. Most did see it as a fun sound bite and a good way to introduce a couple new features. A few others, however, read a bit more into it and asked what Disqus thought about the death of comments and its replacement, the social stream.

We think about comments quite often at Disqus, as you can imagine. Over the weekend, I answered a number of similar questions so I thought I could address this a little better on this blog.

Comments are not dead. Encouraging a real community on your site to have real conversations has always been important. It’s still important today and is only becoming increasingly more relevant. It’s very true that people have choices on where to react to a topic; they can tweet about it, discuss it on Reddit, or share it on FriendFeed. Conversations are happening outside of sites and it’s important to bring that value back to the source content.

That’s why we introduced Reactions, a built-in feature of Disqus that aggregates comments and mentions of your blog post or article and displays them with the comments. We released this about 4 months ago with our friends at uberVU, and are now also working with our friends at BackType, to bring reactions to all publishers using Disqus. Since then, millions of reactions have been aggregated for the discussion communities powered by Disqus. There are a dozen services that we support, including the popular Twitter, FriendFeed, and Digg.

I truly believe in social reactions to augment comments. But how about making it a single social stream in place of conventional comments? Why not throw all comments and reactions into a single timeline? Personally, I believe it’s too noisy. The idea behind a single social stream seems to be for amassing volume of mentions, similar to trackbacks. They’re not very useful. It’s for ego, rather than fostering a coherent discussion. The conversation is continually broken up and the context is lost.

What do you think? I’d like to hear what you think about the future of comments. Disqus is an always-evolving system that should work the way you want it to. If you’d like to check out JS-Kit’s new system that I’ve been referring to, you can see it at http://js-kit.com.

– Daniel

Where did you grow up?

Well I was born in Birmingham, Alabama. But most of my years growing up and discovering what I wanted to do were in Midland, TX. I lived in Birmingham, AL until I was 9, so I don’t really remember a whole lot of it, I guess most of my time there was spent building things out of Legos and K-Nex. Once we moved to Midland, I started my focus on technology. I lived in Midland for 9 years as well. This past year, 2009 obviously, I have started attending a school up in Pennsylvania to obtain a degree in entrepreneurship which I hope will give me a business side to my internet focused mind.

What do you find intriguing about the internet industry?

Probably the biggest thing that draws me is the opportunity for learning and knowledge from other people. I have always believed the saying that, “everyone is an expert at something” and I think that through the web we can fully take advantage of people’s expertise where it matters. There is a huge opportunity online for collaboration and for people with similar interests to help out one another and discover even more about their favorite topics.

What else are you passionate about?

Surprisingly I guess , I do not fit most ‘geeky’ stereotypes. I do a lot of social things with local people, once again showing my love for group communication. I am extremely passionate about music and find myself taking breaks often from web design/coding to jam out some riffs on the guitar. It is a great way to relieve stress and is usually the perfect break to get me inspired on something new with whatever I was working on. I am looking into really getting started with photography, but I haven’t had as much time recently based on quite a bit of client work.

Where did you first hear about Disqus?

Well Disqus just turned out to be the solution to the problem I always knew was there, but never really had a solution for. I think I first ran across Disqus before I really knew a lot about it on a number of high-profile blogs and websites. A lot of people I admired in the web/graphic design industry seemed to have started to adopt it as a standard and after looking into it some, I decided to adopt it as well on my web projects.

What’s your one favorite feature on Disqus?

I think my favorite feature of Disqus is really the core feature itself. I do a lot of web surfing and being able to keep track of where I have posted comments is really essential. Before Disqus, I tried to keep track of things with Delicious bookmarks and email updates, but I soon realized that this type of thing needed its own dedicated system. Which is exactly what Discuss does so perfectly.

What feature would you add to Disqus?

Well I am not sure what all you guys are working on over there, but with the addition of push notifications in the iPhone app store with 3.0, some sort of Disqus app with push notifications I think would rock.

When you graduate what type of company would you like to start?

My dream would be to start a web design or web application development studio. The internet never ceases to fascinate me every day, there is an endless supply of knowledge available to anyone. This really excites me because the more people there are that are seeking to share their ideas and opinions online, the more need their will be for hopeful companies like mine to help out in compiling and organizing that data so that it can be the most useful to as many people as possible. I know that in the future the internet will continue to grow and innovate in finding new ways of helping out people and making everyone’s life easier and I want to be there right at the front of it.

To learn more about Mac visit his twitter, website, or Disqus Profile.

Yola brings website building to Small businesses. Groups and organizations. Non-profits. Your Aunt Martha. The guy in the next cube. Everyone.

Yola previously was Synthasite an installation we have instructions for but they changed a couple things besides the name of the service.

How do I integrate Disqus?

First, a couple questions:

• Do you have a Disqus account? No? You’ll need one, go here.
• Did you add a site? No? Add it here.

Keep in mind there are two types of integrations for Yola.

1. Blog (yeah, duh)
2. Website (single page)

Alright, lets add Disqus to your blog!

• Login to Yola.com
• Click Blog Manager
  
• Click Settings.
• Visit this page and login to Disqus.
  Make sure to choose your site from the drop-down.
• Click Generic Code
• Copy and Paste Snippet #1 on your Yola settings page here:
  

To learn more about adding Disqus to a single page layout or adding CSS visit our help documentation.

Cheers,

OpenID is an open, decentralized standard for user authentication and access control, allowing users to log onto many services with the same digital identity.

Similar to our support for Facebook Connect, & Twitter Sign-in. OpenID makes it easier and quicker for people to jump into a discussion. To enable Open ID, publishers should proceed to Admin/Settings and enable the feature under Options.

For commenters, just look for the OpenID Sign-in button on sites that have this enabled.

Cheers,