Helping to power some of the coolest websites on the internet is one of our very favorite things about what we do here at Disqus.

Last Monday, the digital world was rocked as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp all went down for an unprecedented amount of time (about 6 hours, but it felt like forever, didn't it?) due to a combination of factors involving human error as well as a code update that went awry and prevented Facebook from accessing its own data centers.

Twitter's newest feature, Communities, is set to take on Facebook Groups, Reddit, and Discord as a viable method of creating semi-exclusive, interest-based conversations.

In a move that directly impacts publishers and their ad revenue, Google has recently announced that they’ll be replacing their Scaled Partner Management (SPM) program with Multiple Customer Management (MCM). 

Here at Disqus, we use Trello as our project management tool of choice. Trello lets us plan out our projects in ways that make sense to both developers and product managers. Trello’s Power-Ups library let us integrate Trello with our other existing tools so that they can work seamlessly together.

Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re open-sourcing two internal tools our team uses to get more done with Trello.

To kick off the new year, Disqus hosted a hackathon recently where teams worked on various projects to explore new ideas, solve interesting problems, and build something cool. At the end of the week, teams demoed their projects to the company who voted for their favorites.

Here are four of the most interesting projects that came out of the hackathon. Let us know what you think in the comments below! If you missed the recap of our last HackWeek, visit this blog post here to learn more.

Over the summer we had our annual Disqus Hackweek. We already wrote about the projects that our team hacked away about. Now we want to hear from you:

Earlier this year, we committed to fighting hate speech and began taking the first steps toward curbing toxicity on Disqus. As a Product Analyst, I focus on developing technology to facilitate good content. Our goals for this technology are to enhance community management tools for moderators, give users more power to address abuse and toxic comments within the communities they participate in, and improve the internal tools that our Abuse team uses for reviewing reported content that violates our Terms and Policies.

Here at Disqus, we love our users. We also respect our users and their privacy too. Over the years, we’ve introduced stronger privacy controls such as honoring the Do Not Track setting in browsers, implementing Content Security Policy headers to protect you from any possible XSS attacks, and supporting a solution for loading Disqus over HTTPS. Our Home and moderation interfaces are already HTTPS-only, and now we are proud to announce that our commenting system, Engage, is also HTTPS-only.