disqus api

Ok, the other day i was playing with disqus API, i think the API is very uncustomizable, here is why, what may have lead to that decisions and suggestions for improvements. A friend of mine suggested that i should do something fancy with it's data (like visualize the most used words, or even better build a social graph using info about who's talking to who), the problem here is that you can't access the data (except yours). While i do understand that it takes some thinking on how to do data access, it IMHO should be done, as you are closing the door for a lot of 3rd party funky stuff. It is worth noting that this is documented unfeature:

Accessing your own data is our first priority in developing the API. We want to provide this kind of access in a way that does not infringe on the rights of the forum owner. This is still in progress

So my next idea was to build 0 delay syncer between local comments and disqus. Well, that didn't go too well either. The problem here is that you are handled a black box (the comment text box is the iframe), so you can't attach any javascript events/handlers to it, this is a security feature preventing you from impresonating the user. One way around this would be something complicated such as OAuth (but that requieres users to allow posting as them from certain sites, and requieres qute a bit of work on developer side), the other way around it would be a simple callback, so disqus would POST to certain url (provided by developer) when a comment is made, providing the 0 delay functonality. Another thing to be considered is what happens when/if the disqus servers are unavailable, with OAuth you have the option to sync the comments afterwards (having up to date local copy and ability to post comments during downtime), with callback way, well, if disqus is down you can't have comment submited :-). My final idea was to create a fancy interface for comment moderation (with stuff ala bulk moderation), well, that can't be done either. Not giving me full write access to comments on my forum is just bad (so you can't delete comments or flag them as spam).  (actually, it may make sense that i can't delete the comment, but i should be able to "disassociate" it from my forum) On a related note, i checked out the disqus wordpress plugin, the way they get around the syncing issues is that on every (post) page load they query their API, make a SQL query to comments comparing the two and locally INSERT-ing if necessary. Also another good idea would be to put the CSS locally on the blog using WP, as this way the comments will remain readable even with disqus down.