Commenting Systems & Services

Webweaving
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This thread is for sharing and discussing implementation (and moderation?) of commenting systems / services for personal websites. This is in contrast to a few threads discussing commenting etiquette, culture, preferences, etc. This thread is meant to be more technical / “dry” / resource-focused.

I’ll begin: For example, on my site I’ve utilized FastComments:

I’ve paid a $1 a month for a while now, and while I’ve been satisfied with it (and its convenience), I have been looking towards changing to something different.

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Here’s a random system that made it to my RSS reader:

Powered by RSS Lobster: Publish and read on the open web. Own both sides of the feed.

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Thank you for sharing these! I think comments are one of the trickiest things to implement on an indie personal site, so these will be helpful!

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I’ve been eyeing HTML Commentbox for a while now. My website is hosted on a free neocities account so my options are fairly limited at the moment, and HCB is the most customizable option I could find, since it lets you properly style the CSS of the comment widget.

My one issue is that to requires a Google account to set up. I’m trying to rely less on Google, and my own website is the last place that I’d want to have a Google dependency on. Yet HTML Commentbox is kind of my only really good option out there.

I’ve been considering making a burner Gmail that I use only for this service and nothing else.

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When I first started my blog I had Disqus enabled. Part of the Zonelets set up is written specifically for Disqus. I didn’t like it, though, and ditched it. People can email me or find my on Neocities/Discord/Discourse. But - I still think sometimes about having a comment system. I can’t vouch for any of these but here are some options I’ve found:

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Looks like you have the option of a magic link instead of Google.

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I’ve shared my solution a lot, so apologies for reposting it again! My comment system I made from scratch with 11ty, people sign in with IndieAuth. I recently added the ability to reply to comments and make threads!

The biggest issue is that the entire site requires a rebuild after each comment, so it takes about a minute for new comments to appear, and sometimes that leads to accidental double-posting duplicate comments. Also sometimes certain characters break and I keep all comments in a single JSON file which is getting a little big. All things for future Brennan to worry about :D

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I use cbox and atabook for a comment section of sorts. Used to use chattable, then changed once it went down, been too lazy to put it back to chattable again.

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Some of these came up a while back over on What’s with “Discuss on Mastodon”? Here’s the list I compiled there:

For the time being though, I’ve just been crossposting things to Dreamwidth, which has a comment feature built in.

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oo neat thx for the resources

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