Unexpected Conflict with the Disqus Commenting System

Starting this blog on its own server has been interesting, and a massive learning curve.

Photo by  Dana Marin on Unsplash

I mean, that’s okay – when I was young, PC’s became available for purchase to regular people. Still too complicated by today’s standards, the PC showed that people would buy computers – and I actually went to college for it!
So, learning new things isn’t a problem – I remember someone in college giving me Dbase III on disk, and I had to teach myself a program that essentially was a programming language! (by the way, all of the languages I learned in my computer college are not used any more! RPG-II, anyone?)

So, getting Disqus SHOULD be a piece of cake. Easy to install. Install the plugin into WordPress, sign up for an account, create your API key, install it, and give your website an application name.
And… nothing happened. I still had the WordPress comment system.
Showing “Comments closed”.

So I did some internet searches, and found that this is not a common error. Disqus advises that it’s either a conflict with your theme (EEEK!) or its a conflict with another plugin.
Disqus was willing to go in and fix it for me, but they needed my login and password. That I just was really reluctant to do, so for 2 weeks I poked at it, trying to figure it out.
So, a few days ago (actually I’m writing this Sept 24, which means it was two days ago to me) I did a reset on my Disqus plugin, got that setup and working again, imported all my test WordPress comments, and then I began to systematically turn off plugins I was using.

I was concerned it was Akismet, because that affects your comments. Nope.

My calendar plugin? Nope.

“Stars Rating” by Fahid Javid?

Um…. Wait! Disqus suddenly is working!

Ohmygoodness! Suddenly Disqus is working!

Problem solved! The Stars Rating was causing the conflict!

I still need the WordPress star rating system for posts, but yeah, I think I can get by for now with the basic ‘like’ system!

About the author

Screenplay writer and fiction author