10 ms·

Moving from Disqus to Schnack

173 points by moklick 9y ago

Cyberdog 9y ago
So in order to use this, you need to host a new Node app and SQLite database on your server. Also, things like spam control are now back on you. So why not just use a CMS or blog engine which supports traditional server-side comments? I suppose there is a case if you're hosting static HTML pages but still want them to be commentable, but how many people are doing that? I don't get the use case for this.
- ChrisSD 9y ago
  Indeed. One of the reasons disqus and the like are popular is that they take care of hosting the comments. And having user content on a separate domain isn't a bad idea from a security pov.
  - michaelmior 9y ago
    Nothing's stopping you from running a self-hosted solution on a different domain.
    - ChrisSD 9y ago
      Sure, but then you have to run a self hosted solution on another domain. It's far easier if someone else is willing to do it for you at a low cost (or even free).
      - acgIssues 9y ago
        According to the article, this "free" service comes at the cost of their readers privacy, not being in control of your whole blog (comments) and increased loading time because of the size/requests needed.
      - michaelmior 9y ago
        Seems like this would easily run on the free tier of Heroku for a blog with modest traffic.
- detaro 9y ago
  Because you like everything else about the static blog (static files are easily hosted and trivial to move to other hosts or CDNs, many devs like the integration with git, you like the workflow of doing everything locally until the push to publish, good hosting solutions that scale a lot are really cheap). If something goes wrong with the server you host (suddenly tons of visitors, some failure), only your comments are down, not your entire site, assuming the static hosting is on other infrastructure (and even if not, it's easily moved again). Maybe you used an external service before and want to get rid of it, like the example in the article, but do not want to completely change how your blog works for this.
  - minimaxir 9y ago
    Part of the motivation for using a static site (especially GitHub Pages) is to eliminate the time, energy and cost of doing DevOps. Going full DevOps just for blog comments is not great ROI. If I couldn't use Disqus/FB Comments and was forced to self-host my own blog comments on my static blog, I'd just remove blog comments altogether.
    - detaro 9y ago
      Sure, I can see why you'd make that choice (just as I know people who never would touch Disqus or FB comments). Doesn't mean others wouldn't throw up a comment system somewhere, in the knowledge that the most important part of their site (the content) isn't affected if it doesn't keep up and they exactly do not need to invest the time and energy to "go full DevOps" for that.
    - cgag 9y ago
      I already have a static blog and like 8 non static apps on my server. If I were to add comments I'd rather host a comment server than convert my blog to something other than static files.
    - gka 9y ago
      Part of the motivation for running your own static blog engine (as opposed to Medium) is that you believe in a decentralized internet. I used to run my own Wordpress server for a decade before I gave up dealing with the security flaws and moved to a static blog. Sure, I could’ve just live without comments, but that’s again forcing the discussion into other „centralized“ communities like Twitter or Facebook. So I threw in the time to create and set up Schnack.js to have the best of both worlds: a static no-hazzle website with self-hosted comments. Also I grew up in a time where virtually everyone would have self-hosted comment systems on their static self-hosted websites. Only they used to be called guestbooks then. Working on Schnack really reminded me of that magic time.
- hyperion2010 9y ago
  If you want some dynamic comments why not just use hypothes.is, which is about as minimal as you can get?
- hckr1292 9y ago
  I feel the same. I wonder if a free heroku account and a docker image of the setup would work if you really wanted this? Seems like full on DevOps is not necessary for a very self-contained simple commenting app like this if you wanted to self host with minimal cost/effort.
- NetOpWibby 9y ago
  For people who write their own CMSes (like myself), this is hella useful. I look forward to adding this to my blog once more features get added, although I'd probably switch the database to MongoDB.
- fpoling 9y ago
  It is trivial to make a static blog CDN-friendly, not so much CRM like Wordpress. It is doable, but the amount of efforts is non-trivial. In addition it improves the site security. An XSS bug in commenting code in Wordpress can allow the attacker to become the administrator for the whole site. A similar bug in commenting engine only allows the attacker to damage the comments and temporary disfigure the site with straightforward recovery.
overshard 9y ago
The point of Disqus is that you don't have to host anything and you can publish an essentially "static" website using any static website generator or just plain HTML pages you make yourself. At this point just build your website around the numerous CMS/Blog options available that have numerous solid comment and spam prevention systems.
tomc1985 9y ago
I thought the whole advantage of Disqus was that you can keep your static blog static w/o hosting the server machinery for handling comments a la Wordpress? Schnack takes you back to square one? At that point why not throw up a wordpress install?
- martin_andrino 9y ago
  One advantage of not using WordPress is not having to spend a couple hours every week restoring the latest backup you have because you got hacked again.
  - koko775 9y ago
    Been running WordPress with WordFence, Akismet antispam, and CloudFlare on a site that gets a sizable amount of traffic. No hacks yet - it's not the same insecure mess it was a decade ago.
    - justizin 9y ago
      How often do you upgrade it, and ... is your total effort suitable for a small / personal blog?
      - nekopa 9y ago
        Not who you were replying to, but I helped a Luddite friend set up a wp blog 7 years ago and we had 1 minor hack about 6 years ago. It updates itself automatically so haven't really had to do much work with it.
eeZah7Ux 9y ago
How about integrating a microblogging system like Mastodon in websites so that you don't have to maintain a security sensitive service just for your blog?
tallblondeguy 9y ago
I understand the sentiment to move away from Disqus. How does this project compare to Mozilla's Coral Project[0]? [0]: https://coralproject.net/products/talk.html https://coralproject.net/products/talk.html
- wyattjoh 9y ago
  Developer with The Coral Project here. Schnack seems to provide a simple solution to the "let us put some comments on the site" in a very simple and pleasantly small package. (Like seriously small, we're jealous of those numbers :)) Talk on the other hand provides a full admin panel for moderators, a robust plugin system for configuring every part of the experience. Admittedly, not every small blog is going to need all of our features. If you want comments to work on your small site, Schnack seems to suit that role fine. Talk on the other hand is currently supporting millions of users and tens of millions of comments. It's a matter of scale really, both are great solutions that take the data out of a marketers hands.
  - lloydde 9y ago
    > supporting millions of users and tens of millions of comments That seems like an unusually low number of comments per user, best case 99:1.
    - jessaustin 9y ago
      Most comments on any random blog would be the lone comment left by that particular user, right? Don't these things follow some kind of power law?
      - lloydde 9y ago
        Right, but users are commenters, ie doesn’t include readers. ~ 1:99 seems to suggest the platform is pretty new and/or dominated by low participation communities. Is Mozilla Coral Project federated? Can the same person be easily counted multiple times (user)?
nkkollaw 9y ago
I make this type of comment a lot, but what's up with naming nowadays? How is Schnack pronounced? How easy do you think it would be to tell somebody to try it out and how high are the chances that they'll misspell it and give up finding the site? I don't get it.
- alexkavon 9y ago
  Agreed. Isn't the old rule, if you have to spell it in a loud public space (rather than just saying it), then it's a bad name?
- dominikmauritz 9y ago
  It's German for 'chat'. Here is the translation including audio: https://dict.leo.org/englisch-deutsch/schnack https://dict.leo.org/englisch-deutsch/schnack
  - nkkollaw 9y ago
    I see--thanks. I still think it's very hard to both spell and pronounce as a name for a product, though...
- Analemma_ 9y ago
  I assume it’s like snack, but with an initial sh sound. And I don’t think software projects with inscrutable names are a new thing. I still have no idea how to pronounce “PostgreSQL”, for instance.
  - LeoPanthera 9y ago
    I have always said Post-gres-Q-L which is probably wrong but it's too late to change now. I'm committed.
    - nkkollaw 9y ago
      Same here.
    - 9y ago
modinfo 9y ago
A privacy-focused Disqus alternative https://github.com/adtac/commento https://github.com/adtac/commento
- corobo 9y ago
  Honestly I think that project's using a sledgehammer to hit nails. > There won't be an analytics dashboard with a hundred different pie charts telling you every which way the user interacted with the comments box. (There will be a moderation dashboard in the future, however.) > Commento is not a centralized multi-site commenting system. It's simply impossible to be that and not have some sort of tracking. I want this sort of thing. My clients want this sort of thing. What we don't want is Disqus or whoever it was that just bought them being in control of the analytics, being in control of the comments, being able to willy nilly chuck ads into the mix, being able to go bust without warning and lose all of the data
hckr1292 9y ago
I find the proposition of moving off Disqus and the performance improvements in shnack very compelling, but worry about managing spam and a server. I haven't looked at the repo yet, but I wonder if it would be possible to make the datastore pluggable so that you could replace SQLite with, say, DynamoDB. It seems like at that point you could potentially keep everything serverless. Barring that, would it be possible to separate out the frontend code and define an API such that a lambda function and serverless backend could be produced for this?
- stevekemp 9y ago
  For what it is worth my own "toy" project for self-hosted dynamic comments does exactly that. I support Redis and SQLite for hosting comments, and it should be possible for another user to contribute support for different backing-stores. Plugins are supported for spam-detection, which lets me use the https://blogspam.net https://blogspam.net service (which I host) for doing real-time blog/forum spam detection. My project is here: https://github.com/skx/e-comments/ https://github.com/skx/e-comments/
gidan 9y ago
If you are interested in an alternative to Disqus, take a look at Graphcomment, there is a free plan as well, plus we dont resell your data. https://graphcomment.com https://graphcomment.com Disclaimer: I work for this company.
- dsr_ 9y ago
  Free advice -- worth what you paid for it: for sites who don't get many comments, it doesn't matter what they use. For those that get lots of comments, the two most important things are building a community and moderating it. To a large extent, community depends on history presented cogently. To that end, showing a user where they are in a thread and what they haven't yet read is paramount. Build distinctly better moderation tools, and the experience will be enjoyable, too.
kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
Another thread on the front page right now is talking about how it's very difficult to get views on your blogs now. And I've felt the same. 5-10 years ago I used to get 2-3 digit views on my posts. And I used to use Wordpress / Blogger and the like. Then, when it became fashionable, I spent a lot of time (at least 20-30 hrs, and mind you this was not the geeky kind of work, it was like refactoring code using just grep) converting the blog to one of those static generators, and I suspect that I spent more time migrating all posts than the TOTAL TIME all readers combined have spent on my blog since then. Now I am almost regretting migrating and definitely have no interest whatsoever in spending any more time doing DevOps for the blog.
- Viper007Bond 9y ago
  > definitely have no interest whatsoever in spending any more time doing DevOps for the blog. Honestly that's why I use a managed blogging host. I have better things to do with my time, such as writing content.
  - kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
    Yeah I realized that for the level of readership my blog has, even the time I put in writing a post is probably not worth it, let alone writing template files and figuring out the idiosyncrasies of the templating tool of the day (which almost always has negligible documentation)
    - Viper007Bond 9y ago
      You gotta start somewhere. Write quality content and the viewers will hopefully come.
- NetOpWibby 9y ago
  For some reason, I'm getting 30+ hits a day on my blog (from Russia) for a post I made about dealing with APFS issues. It's a tutorial so there's that. I used to use static generators but I like what I can do with Express more. I now have a custom built static site generator based on Express.
noncoml 9y ago
"lack of control on our own data (the comments, in this case)" That's what worries me about every single website out there. Suddenly they consider users' comments "their own data"
- nkkollaw 9y ago
  Why not? You leave a comment on a website, the websites stores it, it's the websites data.
  - justizin 9y ago
    It's your data and the website has a responsibility to steward it.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - grzm 9y ago
      I can understand where you're coming from, in that you authored the data. However, that's different from ownership. That's determined by the terms of service of the website. If you want to retain full ownership of the content, in some (many?) cases you can only do so by not commenting on their site (or service used by the site), but rather commenting on a site you control. While some people may have an expectation that the site has a responsibility to steward the content provided by users, and I think that's a laudable goal, at the end of the day that is determined by the terms of service.
  - noncoml 9y ago
    You are happy with Gmail owning all your emails then?
    - nkkollaw 9y ago
      I'm not talking about ownership, I'm talking about storage of data. I wouldn't be happy if Google owned my emails, but I'm happy they store them so that I don't have to run a server in my kitchen.
misnamed 9y ago
Why not remove comments entirely? Most people engage on secondary platforms (twitter, facebook) anyway, and most comments are garbage in my experience. Ironically, while trying to post this comment I got ... Bad gateway: The web server reported a bad gateway error.
- cosarara97 9y ago
  The author can't read the comments if people only make them on other platforms.
  - minimaxir 9y ago
    That's going to happen regardless of there being a comments section right on the page.
  - ryen 9y ago
    Sure they can. Author could specify a unique #hashtag for the post that can be used on Twitter/FB. Not sure about other platforms that support hashtags or similar concepts, but its not out of the question to track comments like that elsewhere.
  - misnamed 9y ago
    In most cases on twitter/facebook, the author's official account post is going to be the main area for discussion. For places like here or reddit, alerts are an option.
- drdrey 9y ago
  I think disabling blog comments makes sense these days. In my previous experience managing a wordpress blog, 90% of comments were garbage and the most meaningful discussions happened on platforms where discussions are a natural fit (reddit, HN, Twitter)
- frik 9y ago
  Don't do that. Comment section is great to build a community on your site. There is a reason why sites including former popular news sites loose visitors and visitors stay less long on those sites without comment system. Also sites like HN recently started to heavily moderate news and comments. Lot's of things get removed and hidden away from visitors, to enforce their world view. So it's better to don't feed monopolies like HN and Reddit.
md224 9y ago
A general observation about online comments: when I read an article online and want to know what other people are saying about it, I have no easy & simple way to do so. If your blog has a comments section, that's great, but what about all the other platforms that people discuss things on? (Twitter and Reddit [and of course HN!] come to mind.) I would love to see a comments system that provided insight into commentary occurring across the web. Is there a good reason why online discourse is still fragmented?
- robotbikes 9y ago
  Part of the problem is the walled garden affect of Facebook, is there a public API that provides you with links to public posts about a piece of content ? I doubt it, although Facebook uses this internally to show me random strangers blathering about various news stories. Twitter might be easier but still not sure if there is something that an API can query to find links to a certain article or piece. I remember back in blogging days there was a ping back functionality that was supposed to do something like this. Usually if I find something interesting in the tech sphere I just find people commenting about it on Hacker News and it's a tight but broad enough community to get good discussion.
- guelo 9y ago
  Because the web has devolved into a bunch of walled gardens that try to sell their user bases to advertisers.
  - krapp 9y ago
    No it hasn't. Those walled gardens still comprise a miniscule amount of the actual content on the web. In fact many are link aggregators and depend the existence of content beyond the walled garden to survive. Nothing has devolved except the willingness of users to explore to find new content. But that's not because it no longer exists, but because for the most part new content is delivered to them.
  - ehnto 9y ago
    I think it's okay that the web has different communities on it. The web has grown in population at a staggering rate, if we had the same system we used to have of public boards that would be full to the brim and people would be seeking quieter spots anyway. I don't like the idea of walled gardens for advertising at all mind you. But different communities, some of them private, makes total sense for such a large population.
ChuckMcM 9y ago
It is an interesting comment on the state of commenting. Gardening the comments section is a lot of work and not something people want to spend their time on (the Blekko blog would get hundreds of spam comment attempts every day!). That makes me wonder if there is also an opportunity for a 'meta comment' section which pulls comments from web sites like HN, Reddit, or Slashdot and puts them below the blog / article that they are related to. You could set an arbitrary vote level cutoff limit.
- tomcam 9y ago
  So HN pays dang to curate, then ChucksCommentScraper.io appropriates that content for free?
  - ChuckMcM 9y ago
    That's a fair point. What I was thinking about was avoiding the possibly apocryphal notion that stories that included a link to HN for comments were penalized. It maybe that only stories that link to the 'upvote' link are penalized.
- lambda 9y ago
  I've been considering doing a static/semi-static blog system which just notifies the user of discussions on referring sites, and makes it easy to link to and excerpt interesting discussion. Possibly even gives an easy way to submit links to start discussion on preferred sites. That way, everything displayed on your blog is explicitly added there by the author, but once an interesting discussion has started you can easily direct users to it and they can participate under moderation rules of whatever forum that is.
ausjke 9y ago
I actually like hacknews' comment style the most, neat and simple, good enough for talks, no images and no videos etc too. wish there are some light-weight forum code that is nodejs based, nodebb is a little heavy, and I don't really enjoy discourse's UI.
- abraae 9y ago
  I wonder if one of the keys to HN's success, apart from great moderation, is that poster's identities are very subdued. I feel it encourages responding to the post, rather than the person making it. By contrast discourse stuffs a big image of the poster and their username in your face, as does Reddit. I find the first impression on those platforms is that I'm talking to someone with Donald Trump's head as an Avatar and a provocative username. Which does not naturally lead to considered response.
  - KajMagnus 9y ago
    It'd be interesting, if, at Reddit / Discourse / other places, people's names are hidden, until one clicks the post header, to reveal the username. Then, when reading a comment, one won't know who wrote it. And can think about the content, more unbiased. And afterwards, one can click the username, in case one wants to know who the author is, because ... ... who wrote it can still matter. For example, if someone says a Linux kernel version should be avoided because of a serious bug, and he is Linus Torvalds, then you can trust that info for sure, just by looking at the name.
- KajMagnus 9y ago
  Maybe you'd like EffectiveDiscussions — it's light weight, client side, 140 kb js (but not server side). It's inspired by Hacker News and Reddit, as you can see on this demo page: https://insightful.demo.ed.community/-11/my-son-was-sent-home-from-sleepover-for-bad-behavior https://insightful.demo.ed.community/-11/my-son-was-sent-hom... + improvements about two things here at HN that make me annoyed :-P https://www.effectivediscussions.org/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-3-things https://www.effectivediscussions.org/-32/how-hacker-news-can...
greggman 9y ago
first off , if you turn off ads on disqus there are no 3rd party requests. maybe that will change with the new owners but it's disingenuous to claim disqus is doing something bad here when there's an option to turn it off. Otherwise the number one reason I stated using disqus is spam. I wrote my own blogging and comment system in 2000. When that got spammed I switched to WordPress around 2008. Even with their anti-spam features I got tons of comment spam. I switched to disqus many years ago and I think I've had no more than 2 spam comments per year since. Disqus benefits from being everywhere in that it can see a bad actor and prevent them from being bad everywhere else. How will this system handle that?
- fpoling 9y ago
  Unless a blog is popular, it is enough to protect posts with Google capture or similar. On a self-hosting forum with 200-300 daily views and few posts I got up to 30 daily spam attempts by bots that passed through email registration. Google capture removed all of that so far.
EGreg 9y ago
Web push? That's only for Android! This author must not own an iPhone
alhafizco 9y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GTqoiH3FUk&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GTqoiH3FUk&feature=youtu.be
KajMagnus 9y ago
Setting up a server and installing commenting software, and configuring OpenAuth etc login takes some time. If you want to skip all that, you can use Effective Discussions embedded comments, demo: https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments. It's open source (https://github.com/debiki/ed-server https://github.com/debiki/ed-server, I'm developing it), no ads, and has the features Schnack has (notifications via email) and some unique things people here at HN might like: https://www.effectivediscussions.org/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-3-things https://www.effectivediscussions.org/-32/how-hacker-news-can... Go to https://www.effectivediscussions.org/ https://www.effectivediscussions.org/ and click Create Forum and then choose Blog Comments if you want to try it out. (I hope some self promotion is ok.) It's also lightweight, just a 140 kb Javascript bundle.
- gka 9y ago
  I wouldn’t exactly call 140k „lightweight“ ;-)
  - KajMagnus 9y ago
    I suppose it depends on with what one compares. Compared with Disqus, which is, according to the article, about 750 kb, then, light-weigth. Compared with Schnack, then not light-weight. So, maybe both "yes" and "no" makes sense. Anyway it loads quickly on my mobile phone (before I've scrolled down to the blog comments if I start scrolling directly) — maybe that's what matters, anything else people aren't going to notice anyway. ... Hmm unless they're on a slow 3G connection, then would be good if I could remove more js.
andrewalan 9y ago
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173 points by moklick 9y ago

So in order to use this, you need to host a new Node app and SQLite database on your server. Also, things like spam control are now back on you. So why not just use a CMS or blog engine which supports traditional server-side comments? I suppose there is a case if you're hosting static HTML pages but still want them to be commentable, but how many people are doing that? I don't get the use case for this.

ChrisSD 9y ago
Indeed. One of the reasons disqus and the like are popular is that they take care of hosting the comments. And having user content on a separate domain isn't a bad idea from a security pov.
- michaelmior 9y ago
  Nothing's stopping you from running a self-hosted solution on a different domain.
  - ChrisSD 9y ago
    Sure, but then you have to run a self hosted solution on another domain. It's far easier if someone else is willing to do it for you at a low cost (or even free).
    - acgIssues 9y ago
      According to the article, this "free" service comes at the cost of their readers privacy, not being in control of your whole blog (comments) and increased loading time because of the size/requests needed.
    - michaelmior 9y ago
      Seems like this would easily run on the free tier of Heroku for a blog with modest traffic.
detaro 9y ago
Because you like everything else about the static blog (static files are easily hosted and trivial to move to other hosts or CDNs, many devs like the integration with git, you like the workflow of doing everything locally until the push to publish, good hosting solutions that scale a lot are really cheap). If something goes wrong with the server you host (suddenly tons of visitors, some failure), only your comments are down, not your entire site, assuming the static hosting is on other infrastructure (and even if not, it's easily moved again). Maybe you used an external service before and want to get rid of it, like the example in the article, but do not want to completely change how your blog works for this.
- minimaxir 9y ago
  Part of the motivation for using a static site (especially GitHub Pages) is to eliminate the time, energy and cost of doing DevOps. Going full DevOps just for blog comments is not great ROI. If I couldn't use Disqus/FB Comments and was forced to self-host my own blog comments on my static blog, I'd just remove blog comments altogether.
  - detaro 9y ago
    Sure, I can see why you'd make that choice (just as I know people who never would touch Disqus or FB comments). Doesn't mean others wouldn't throw up a comment system somewhere, in the knowledge that the most important part of their site (the content) isn't affected if it doesn't keep up and they exactly do not need to invest the time and energy to "go full DevOps" for that.
  - cgag 9y ago
    I already have a static blog and like 8 non static apps on my server. If I were to add comments I'd rather host a comment server than convert my blog to something other than static files.
  - gka 9y ago
    Part of the motivation for running your own static blog engine (as opposed to Medium) is that you believe in a decentralized internet. I used to run my own Wordpress server for a decade before I gave up dealing with the security flaws and moved to a static blog. Sure, I could’ve just live without comments, but that’s again forcing the discussion into other „centralized“ communities like Twitter or Facebook. So I threw in the time to create and set up Schnack.js to have the best of both worlds: a static no-hazzle website with self-hosted comments. Also I grew up in a time where virtually everyone would have self-hosted comment systems on their static self-hosted websites. Only they used to be called guestbooks then. Working on Schnack really reminded me of that magic time.
hyperion2010 9y ago
If you want some dynamic comments why not just use hypothes.is, which is about as minimal as you can get?
hckr1292 9y ago
I feel the same. I wonder if a free heroku account and a docker image of the setup would work if you really wanted this? Seems like full on DevOps is not necessary for a very self-contained simple commenting app like this if you wanted to self host with minimal cost/effort.
NetOpWibby 9y ago
For people who write their own CMSes (like myself), this is hella useful. I look forward to adding this to my blog once more features get added, although I'd probably switch the database to MongoDB.
fpoling 9y ago
It is trivial to make a static blog CDN-friendly, not so much CRM like Wordpress. It is doable, but the amount of efforts is non-trivial. In addition it improves the site security. An XSS bug in commenting code in Wordpress can allow the attacker to become the administrator for the whole site. A similar bug in commenting engine only allows the attacker to damage the comments and temporary disfigure the site with straightforward recovery.

overshard 9y ago

The point of Disqus is that you don't have to host anything and you can publish an essentially "static" website using any static website generator or just plain HTML pages you make yourself. At this point just build your website around the numerous CMS/Blog options available that have numerous solid comment and spam prevention systems.

tomc1985 9y ago

I thought the whole advantage of Disqus was that you can keep your static blog static w/o hosting the server machinery for handling comments a la Wordpress? Schnack takes you back to square one? At that point why not throw up a wordpress install?

martin_andrino 9y ago
One advantage of not using WordPress is not having to spend a couple hours every week restoring the latest backup you have because you got hacked again.
- koko775 9y ago
  Been running WordPress with WordFence, Akismet antispam, and CloudFlare on a site that gets a sizable amount of traffic. No hacks yet - it's not the same insecure mess it was a decade ago.
  - justizin 9y ago
    How often do you upgrade it, and ... is your total effort suitable for a small / personal blog?
    - nekopa 9y ago
      Not who you were replying to, but I helped a Luddite friend set up a wp blog 7 years ago and we had 1 minor hack about 6 years ago. It updates itself automatically so haven't really had to do much work with it.

eeZah7Ux 9y ago

How about integrating a microblogging system like Mastodon in websites so that you don't have to maintain a security sensitive service just for your blog?

tallblondeguy 9y ago

I understand the sentiment to move away from Disqus. How does this project compare to Mozilla's Coral Project[0]? [0]: https://coralproject.net/products/talk.html https://coralproject.net/products/talk.html

wyattjoh 9y ago
Developer with The Coral Project here. Schnack seems to provide a simple solution to the "let us put some comments on the site" in a very simple and pleasantly small package. (Like seriously small, we're jealous of those numbers :)) Talk on the other hand provides a full admin panel for moderators, a robust plugin system for configuring every part of the experience. Admittedly, not every small blog is going to need all of our features. If you want comments to work on your small site, Schnack seems to suit that role fine. Talk on the other hand is currently supporting millions of users and tens of millions of comments. It's a matter of scale really, both are great solutions that take the data out of a marketers hands.
- lloydde 9y ago
  > supporting millions of users and tens of millions of comments That seems like an unusually low number of comments per user, best case 99:1.
  - jessaustin 9y ago
    Most comments on any random blog would be the lone comment left by that particular user, right? Don't these things follow some kind of power law?
    - lloydde 9y ago
      Right, but users are commenters, ie doesn’t include readers. ~ 1:99 seems to suggest the platform is pretty new and/or dominated by low participation communities. Is Mozilla Coral Project federated? Can the same person be easily counted multiple times (user)?

nkkollaw 9y ago

I make this type of comment a lot, but what's up with naming nowadays? How is Schnack pronounced? How easy do you think it would be to tell somebody to try it out and how high are the chances that they'll misspell it and give up finding the site? I don't get it.

alexkavon 9y ago
Agreed. Isn't the old rule, if you have to spell it in a loud public space (rather than just saying it), then it's a bad name?
dominikmauritz 9y ago
It's German for 'chat'. Here is the translation including audio: https://dict.leo.org/englisch-deutsch/schnack https://dict.leo.org/englisch-deutsch/schnack
- nkkollaw 9y ago
  I see--thanks. I still think it's very hard to both spell and pronounce as a name for a product, though...
Analemma_ 9y ago
I assume it’s like snack, but with an initial sh sound. And I don’t think software projects with inscrutable names are a new thing. I still have no idea how to pronounce “PostgreSQL”, for instance.
- LeoPanthera 9y ago
  I have always said Post-gres-Q-L which is probably wrong but it's too late to change now. I'm committed.
  - nkkollaw 9y ago
    Same here.
  - 9y ago

modinfo 9y ago

A privacy-focused Disqus alternative https://github.com/adtac/commento https://github.com/adtac/commento

corobo 9y ago
Honestly I think that project's using a sledgehammer to hit nails. > There won't be an analytics dashboard with a hundred different pie charts telling you every which way the user interacted with the comments box. (There will be a moderation dashboard in the future, however.) > Commento is not a centralized multi-site commenting system. It's simply impossible to be that and not have some sort of tracking. I want this sort of thing. My clients want this sort of thing. What we don't want is Disqus or whoever it was that just bought them being in control of the analytics, being in control of the comments, being able to willy nilly chuck ads into the mix, being able to go bust without warning and lose all of the data

hckr1292 9y ago

I find the proposition of moving off Disqus and the performance improvements in shnack very compelling, but worry about managing spam and a server. I haven't looked at the repo yet, but I wonder if it would be possible to make the datastore pluggable so that you could replace SQLite with, say, DynamoDB. It seems like at that point you could potentially keep everything serverless. Barring that, would it be possible to separate out the frontend code and define an API such that a lambda function and serverless backend could be produced for this?

stevekemp 9y ago
For what it is worth my own "toy" project for self-hosted dynamic comments does exactly that. I support Redis and SQLite for hosting comments, and it should be possible for another user to contribute support for different backing-stores. Plugins are supported for spam-detection, which lets me use the https://blogspam.net https://blogspam.net service (which I host) for doing real-time blog/forum spam detection. My project is here: https://github.com/skx/e-comments/ https://github.com/skx/e-comments/

gidan 9y ago

If you are interested in an alternative to Disqus, take a look at Graphcomment, there is a free plan as well, plus we dont resell your data. https://graphcomment.com https://graphcomment.com Disclaimer: I work for this company.

dsr_ 9y ago
Free advice -- worth what you paid for it: for sites who don't get many comments, it doesn't matter what they use. For those that get lots of comments, the two most important things are building a community and moderating it. To a large extent, community depends on history presented cogently. To that end, showing a user where they are in a thread and what they haven't yet read is paramount. Build distinctly better moderation tools, and the experience will be enjoyable, too.

kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago

Another thread on the front page right now is talking about how it's very difficult to get views on your blogs now. And I've felt the same. 5-10 years ago I used to get 2-3 digit views on my posts. And I used to use Wordpress / Blogger and the like. Then, when it became fashionable, I spent a lot of time (at least 20-30 hrs, and mind you this was not the geeky kind of work, it was like refactoring code using just grep) converting the blog to one of those static generators, and I suspect that I spent more time migrating all posts than the TOTAL TIME all readers combined have spent on my blog since then. Now I am almost regretting migrating and definitely have no interest whatsoever in spending any more time doing DevOps for the blog.

Viper007Bond 9y ago
> definitely have no interest whatsoever in spending any more time doing DevOps for the blog. Honestly that's why I use a managed blogging host. I have better things to do with my time, such as writing content.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
  Yeah I realized that for the level of readership my blog has, even the time I put in writing a post is probably not worth it, let alone writing template files and figuring out the idiosyncrasies of the templating tool of the day (which almost always has negligible documentation)
  - Viper007Bond 9y ago
    You gotta start somewhere. Write quality content and the viewers will hopefully come.
NetOpWibby 9y ago
For some reason, I'm getting 30+ hits a day on my blog (from Russia) for a post I made about dealing with APFS issues. It's a tutorial so there's that. I used to use static generators but I like what I can do with Express more. I now have a custom built static site generator based on Express.

noncoml 9y ago

"lack of control on our own data (the comments, in this case)" That's what worries me about every single website out there. Suddenly they consider users' comments "their own data"

nkkollaw 9y ago
Why not? You leave a comment on a website, the websites stores it, it's the websites data.
- justizin 9y ago
  It's your data and the website has a responsibility to steward it.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - grzm 9y ago
    I can understand where you're coming from, in that you authored the data. However, that's different from ownership. That's determined by the terms of service of the website. If you want to retain full ownership of the content, in some (many?) cases you can only do so by not commenting on their site (or service used by the site), but rather commenting on a site you control. While some people may have an expectation that the site has a responsibility to steward the content provided by users, and I think that's a laudable goal, at the end of the day that is determined by the terms of service.
- noncoml 9y ago
  You are happy with Gmail owning all your emails then?
  - nkkollaw 9y ago
    I'm not talking about ownership, I'm talking about storage of data. I wouldn't be happy if Google owned my emails, but I'm happy they store them so that I don't have to run a server in my kitchen.

misnamed 9y ago

Why not remove comments entirely? Most people engage on secondary platforms (twitter, facebook) anyway, and most comments are garbage in my experience. Ironically, while trying to post this comment I got ... Bad gateway: The web server reported a bad gateway error.

cosarara97 9y ago
The author can't read the comments if people only make them on other platforms.
- minimaxir 9y ago
  That's going to happen regardless of there being a comments section right on the page.
- ryen 9y ago
  Sure they can. Author could specify a unique #hashtag for the post that can be used on Twitter/FB. Not sure about other platforms that support hashtags or similar concepts, but its not out of the question to track comments like that elsewhere.
- misnamed 9y ago
  In most cases on twitter/facebook, the author's official account post is going to be the main area for discussion. For places like here or reddit, alerts are an option.
drdrey 9y ago
I think disabling blog comments makes sense these days. In my previous experience managing a wordpress blog, 90% of comments were garbage and the most meaningful discussions happened on platforms where discussions are a natural fit (reddit, HN, Twitter)
frik 9y ago
Don't do that. Comment section is great to build a community on your site. There is a reason why sites including former popular news sites loose visitors and visitors stay less long on those sites without comment system. Also sites like HN recently started to heavily moderate news and comments. Lot's of things get removed and hidden away from visitors, to enforce their world view. So it's better to don't feed monopolies like HN and Reddit.

md224 9y ago

A general observation about online comments: when I read an article online and want to know what other people are saying about it, I have no easy & simple way to do so. If your blog has a comments section, that's great, but what about all the other platforms that people discuss things on? (Twitter and Reddit [and of course HN!] come to mind.) I would love to see a comments system that provided insight into commentary occurring across the web. Is there a good reason why online discourse is still fragmented?

robotbikes 9y ago
Part of the problem is the walled garden affect of Facebook, is there a public API that provides you with links to public posts about a piece of content ? I doubt it, although Facebook uses this internally to show me random strangers blathering about various news stories. Twitter might be easier but still not sure if there is something that an API can query to find links to a certain article or piece. I remember back in blogging days there was a ping back functionality that was supposed to do something like this. Usually if I find something interesting in the tech sphere I just find people commenting about it on Hacker News and it's a tight but broad enough community to get good discussion.
guelo 9y ago
Because the web has devolved into a bunch of walled gardens that try to sell their user bases to advertisers.
- krapp 9y ago
  No it hasn't. Those walled gardens still comprise a miniscule amount of the actual content on the web. In fact many are link aggregators and depend the existence of content beyond the walled garden to survive. Nothing has devolved except the willingness of users to explore to find new content. But that's not because it no longer exists, but because for the most part new content is delivered to them.
- ehnto 9y ago
  I think it's okay that the web has different communities on it. The web has grown in population at a staggering rate, if we had the same system we used to have of public boards that would be full to the brim and people would be seeking quieter spots anyway. I don't like the idea of walled gardens for advertising at all mind you. But different communities, some of them private, makes total sense for such a large population.

ChuckMcM 9y ago

It is an interesting comment on the state of commenting. Gardening the comments section is a lot of work and not something people want to spend their time on (the Blekko blog would get hundreds of spam comment attempts every day!). That makes me wonder if there is also an opportunity for a 'meta comment' section which pulls comments from web sites like HN, Reddit, or Slashdot and puts them below the blog / article that they are related to. You could set an arbitrary vote level cutoff limit.

tomcam 9y ago
So HN pays dang to curate, then ChucksCommentScraper.io appropriates that content for free?
- ChuckMcM 9y ago
  That's a fair point. What I was thinking about was avoiding the possibly apocryphal notion that stories that included a link to HN for comments were penalized. It maybe that only stories that link to the 'upvote' link are penalized.
lambda 9y ago
I've been considering doing a static/semi-static blog system which just notifies the user of discussions on referring sites, and makes it easy to link to and excerpt interesting discussion. Possibly even gives an easy way to submit links to start discussion on preferred sites. That way, everything displayed on your blog is explicitly added there by the author, but once an interesting discussion has started you can easily direct users to it and they can participate under moderation rules of whatever forum that is.

ausjke 9y ago

I actually like hacknews' comment style the most, neat and simple, good enough for talks, no images and no videos etc too. wish there are some light-weight forum code that is nodejs based, nodebb is a little heavy, and I don't really enjoy discourse's UI.

abraae 9y ago
I wonder if one of the keys to HN's success, apart from great moderation, is that poster's identities are very subdued. I feel it encourages responding to the post, rather than the person making it. By contrast discourse stuffs a big image of the poster and their username in your face, as does Reddit. I find the first impression on those platforms is that I'm talking to someone with Donald Trump's head as an Avatar and a provocative username. Which does not naturally lead to considered response.
- KajMagnus 9y ago
  It'd be interesting, if, at Reddit / Discourse / other places, people's names are hidden, until one clicks the post header, to reveal the username. Then, when reading a comment, one won't know who wrote it. And can think about the content, more unbiased. And afterwards, one can click the username, in case one wants to know who the author is, because ... ... who wrote it can still matter. For example, if someone says a Linux kernel version should be avoided because of a serious bug, and he is Linus Torvalds, then you can trust that info for sure, just by looking at the name.
KajMagnus 9y ago
Maybe you'd like EffectiveDiscussions — it's light weight, client side, 140 kb js (but not server side). It's inspired by Hacker News and Reddit, as you can see on this demo page: https://insightful.demo.ed.community/-11/my-son-was-sent-home-from-sleepover-for-bad-behavior https://insightful.demo.ed.community/-11/my-son-was-sent-hom... + improvements about two things here at HN that make me annoyed :-P https://www.effectivediscussions.org/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-3-things https://www.effectivediscussions.org/-32/how-hacker-news-can...

greggman 9y ago

first off , if you turn off ads on disqus there are no 3rd party requests. maybe that will change with the new owners but it's disingenuous to claim disqus is doing something bad here when there's an option to turn it off. Otherwise the number one reason I stated using disqus is spam. I wrote my own blogging and comment system in 2000. When that got spammed I switched to WordPress around 2008. Even with their anti-spam features I got tons of comment spam. I switched to disqus many years ago and I think I've had no more than 2 spam comments per year since. Disqus benefits from being everywhere in that it can see a bad actor and prevent them from being bad everywhere else. How will this system handle that?

fpoling 9y ago
Unless a blog is popular, it is enough to protect posts with Google capture or similar. On a self-hosting forum with 200-300 daily views and few posts I got up to 30 daily spam attempts by bots that passed through email registration. Google capture removed all of that so far.

EGreg 9y ago

Web push? That's only for Android! This author must not own an iPhone

alhafizco 9y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GTqoiH3FUk&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GTqoiH3FUk&feature=youtu.be

KajMagnus 9y ago

Setting up a server and installing commenting software, and configuring OpenAuth etc login takes some time. If you want to skip all that, you can use Effective Discussions embedded comments, demo: https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments. It's open source (https://github.com/debiki/ed-server https://github.com/debiki/ed-server, I'm developing it), no ads, and has the features Schnack has (notifications via email) and some unique things people here at HN might like: https://www.effectivediscussions.org/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-3-things https://www.effectivediscussions.org/-32/how-hacker-news-can... Go to https://www.effectivediscussions.org/ https://www.effectivediscussions.org/ and click Create Forum and then choose Blog Comments if you want to try it out. (I hope some self promotion is ok.) It's also lightweight, just a 140 kb Javascript bundle.

gka 9y ago
I wouldn’t exactly call 140k „lightweight“ ;-)
- KajMagnus 9y ago
  I suppose it depends on with what one compares. Compared with Disqus, which is, according to the article, about 750 kb, then, light-weigth. Compared with Schnack, then not light-weight. So, maybe both "yes" and "no" makes sense. Anyway it loads quickly on my mobile phone (before I've scrolled down to the blog comments if I start scrolling directly) — maybe that's what matters, anything else people aren't going to notice anyway. ... Hmm unless they're on a slow 3G connection, then would be good if I could remove more js.

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