Recently, there have been quite a few things happening, one after another, that are quite annoying. It's like that advertising slogan, "It feels like my body has been emptied...". Maybe I haven't been washing my hands properly lately ☹. Even this little blog has a problem now (to be precise, the comment system is having issues). Since the Ghost blog itself does not come with a comment system, there are very few options available in China that are appealing. If there were more options, I would definitely use them... Unfortunately, the one I used before, the Chinese version of Disqus (fooleap's PHP cURL forwarding Disqus API requests), was quite good, but it requires a PHP host outside the Great Firewall as a prerequisite. Things outside the Great Firewall cannot be compared to those inside (I can't afford a good VPN?). Later, I started using Valine (a fast, concise, and efficient backend-less comment system based on Leancloud), with the support of the great panjunwen in the backend. It can achieve functions such as comment notifications and spam filtering, and it runs within the Great Firewall, providing a good user experience and stability (before September 10th).
Since my Valine comment system is deployed on the East China node, it had the "honor" of being "visited" on September 10th. In fact, I only noticed the email notification on the 11th when I realized that all the comments on my blog were gone (it's been so many years since 9/11 in the US, why is this still happening?). I'm not too sad about it because my little blog doesn't usually have many people leaving comments or replying to posts, so... optimistic? Since East China is so niche (officially, East China is a new node with fewer users, so that's why...), let's switch back to North China. It's just a matter of redeploying and copying and pasting, and it didn't take long for the North China node to be up and running again...
Time has passed, and when I visited fooleap's and 1900's blogs and saw that they were using Disqus, I suddenly had the idea of returning (I still have a little bit of the enthusiasm for tinkering left). So once again, the comments on my blog have returned from Valine to Disqus, and the comments on previous articles have reappeared as well. Although Disqus is outside the Great Firewall, it's still quite reliable (compared to these domestic applications, it's not just a little bit stronger. They talk about being permanently free, but you have to make sure you can last that long before you can talk about being permanently free). However, after switching back to Disqus, I found that there were no email notifications for comments. I'll ask F about it when I have time, but for now, let's just use it and tinker with it later.
Update on September 15, 2018: I don't know why, but using Disqus for comments is fine, but the email notifications are either missing or very slow (I don't know when I'll suddenly receive an email saying there's a comment after someone has commented). Today, I saw that D has updated the modified version of Valine (added features such as notifications for the blog owner and @mentions, and the ability to customize email notification templates), and I couldn't resist. I've switched back again. LeanCloud-based comments, notifications, etc. are still very fast. I hope the North China node won't be so fragile (backups?).