Disqus not displaying comment count

SUMMARY: I am setting up disqus to display a comment count on a page within our MVC .net site. I have 'fixed' this feature before on a Tumblr page, so I thought I had the needed skills to do this fairly easily on this site but am failing. I have also reviewed all of Ryan's (https://stackoverflow.com/users/1370956/ryan-v) applicable answers but have not found a solution.

I am following the directions from disqus.com for this:

https://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/565624

but am having no success. My understanding is that all I need to do is:

1. Add the script with disqus_shortname replaced within it
2. Insert a href tag with "#disqus_thread" appended to the end of the article url

Once that is done I think the script should insert the comment count number and display it on the page -- but this isn't working for me.

In tumblr you are supposed to insert a meta tag

<meta name='text:Disqus Shortname' content='' />

but I don't believe that applies in my setting (although that didn't stop me from giving it a try).

I can only assume that I'm missing something obvious. I wonder if the localhost environment is interrupting my testing since I am using a link to a localhost page that is displaying disqus comments. I also have tested using a live disqus comment page but with the same results.

DETAILS: Currently I have tested a number of wrong things, but I believe the following is the least-wrong:

Script:

<script type="text/javascript">
    /* * * CONFIGURATION VARIABLES: EDIT BEFORE PASTING INTO YOUR WEBPAGE * * */
    var disqus_shortname = 'My-Shortname'; // required: replace example with your forum shortname

    /* * * DON'T EDIT BELOW THIS LINE * * */
    (function () {
        var s = document.createElement('script'); s.async = true;
        s.type = 'text/javascript';
        s.src = '//' + disqus_shortname + '.disqus.com/count.js';
        (document.getElementsByTagName('HEAD')[0] || document.getElementsByTagName('BODY')[0]).appendChild(s);
    }());
</script>

HTML:

<a href="http://localhost-link/#disqus_thread"></a>

So, this will probably make perfect sense to everyone who will never come to actually look at this question, it turned out that using the '#' by itself didn't work for us, instead it had to be used in conjunction with the '&' - an example:

<a href="http://localhost-link&#disqus_thread" data-disqus-identifier="12345"></a>

Also ended up using the identifier attribute, you can read about that on the same disqus article linked in my original question.