Restore giscus comments on all posts

[aburnim]

Problem

Comments had silently disappeared from most posts. They were never wired into the layout. Instead, {% include github-comments.html %} was pasted by hand at the bottom of each post body, and new posts stopped copying that line. Only 15 of 32 posts still had it, the most recent from February 2026.

_config.yml also defaulted posts to comments: false, so any post that forgot comments: true in its front matter got nothing either.

Fix

• Wire giscus in through the Minimal Mistakes native comments provider, so every post gets a comment box automatically with no per-post markup
• Flip the post default to comments: true
• Remove the hand-pasted include from 15 posts, which would otherwise render a second, duplicate comment box
• Pin url and baseurl explicitly

discussion_term is set to title, matching the old data-mapping="title", so existing GitHub Discussions reattach to their original posts rather than starting fresh.

Why url and baseurl are pinned

Setting repository is required by the theme's giscus include for data-repo, but it also activates jekyll-github-metadata, which then infers a wrong baseurl of /pages/diff-use and breaks every link on the site. Pinning both values overrides that inference and makes local and Pages builds behave identically. There's a comment in _config.yml explaining this so the lines don't get removed later.

Verification

Production build (JEKYLL_ENV=production bundle exec jekyll build):

• All 34 posts render exactly one <section id="giscus-comments">
• Zero leftover manual includes, zero posts with comments disabled
• All homepage post links resolve to real files, zero broken
• No /pages/diff-use references anywhere in the output

Note that comments are intentionally hidden in dev builds. The theme shows a "disabled in non-production environments" placeholder instead, so the production flag is needed to see them locally.

Expected check failures

• Workers Builds — pre-existing. This check fails on every branch and passes only on main, since Cloudflare builds the production branch only. It was red on PRs made team member changes #33, Update Careers postings #34, and Add PLUG blog post with overview figure and author update #35, all of which merged fine.
• Secret scan — blocked by the new org ruleset. diff-use/github-workflows is private while this repo is public, and GitHub rejects that with "Workflows cannot be required from a less visible repository." Unrelated to the contents of this PR.

Out of scope

_posts/2025-11-10-allhands.md and _posts/2026-02-02-allhands.md both build to /posts/allhands/, so one silently overwrites the other. Pre-existing and left alone here, since fixing it changes a published URL.

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Status	Name	Latest Commit	Updated (UTC)
❌ Deployment failed View logs	diffuse-website	d0c2bba	Jul 28 2026, 08:12 PM