Choosing comments for Cr;Lf;
Since I launched the Cr;Lf; website almost a year ago, I thought about having some sort of interaction from potential readers. At least some reaction, like/ dislike, love/ hate, or something similar. And of course, I wanted people to comment.
So, now that one of my articles is getting a lot of traffic and I didn’t give my website much love in the last months, I’m considering this much more.
There’s always the possibility to share a link from Cr;Lf; on Twitter, or Facebook, or Reddit and comment in there. But that moves the comments on those platforms, in those silos which makes me pretty unconfortable.
The main and best known platform for commenting is Disqus. I’m not even considering it, because it’s a horrible privacy nightmare.
I searched for alternatives on DuckDuckGo, I played with Hyvor Talk. It’s nice and flexible, but after looking at their privacy policy and the requests they’re making to Google Analytics, Google Fonts, Facebook and others, I decided to stay away.
So I started checking the list from https://alternativeto.net/software/disqus/
From those links I found even more links and so on… As you know, I’m a big fan of keeping lists of links, so here they are:
- https://indieweb.org/comments - IndieWeb comments is something I considered first when I created this blog, but it sounded very complicated and I had no idea how to start. More recently, I found a lot of articles about how to enable it so I’ll have it soon;
- https://github.com/umputun/remark42 - very very promising (Go);
- https://github.com/schn4ck/schnack - very promising (Node.js). This is the Hello Schnack.js from one of the creators;
- https://github.com/posativ/isso - also very promising (Python);
Maybe not:
- https://github.com/utterance/utterances - nice idea! Written in Typescript. I won’t use it because it means the reader needs a Github account. And I don’t agree that if data stored in GitHub issues, you’re not locked 🔓
- https://github.com/talkatv/talkatv - written in Python. Last commit in december 2012…
- https://intensedebate.com/ - seems free and customizable, but I don’t see any source and the privacy policy scares me.
- https://github.com/jacobwb/hashover - written in PHP.
- https://getreplybox.com/ - seems to lack a lot of features.
- http://gentlesource.com/comment-script/ - written in PHP.
I will enable IndieWeb for sure, but I think it’s not enough, I would like the users to login via Twitter, or Google, or Facebook, or e-mail and be able to write comments.
I’ll create another note when I decide.
⏳ 29 june 2020 :: Discovered https://commento.io/ and tried it. On their pricing page, they say “15-day trial period” but I was billed immediately when I added my card… Then I tried to embed their script, but I get the “Your Commento.io account has been suspended. Go to the Commento dashboard to resolve this.”, even if I can’t find any errors in the dashboard, or the website options… Sent them an e-mail to get support, but no answer yet. I’m very disappointed, to say the least.
⏳ 6 july 2020 :: Still no response from https://commento.io/ and the comments are still not working. I canceled the subscription and deleted my account. This failed experiment cost me $5…
::update:: Removed https://talkyard.io/blog-comments from the list, because it’s a forum/ chat software, more than comments.
