The reliance on JavaScript is a big turn off for me with these third-party comment systems, and why I stick with what WordPress provides by default—with a few m

The reliance on JavaScript is a big turn off for me with these third-party comment systems, and why I stick with what WordPress provides by default—with a few modifications to increase privacy. The ideal comment system for me would use the mailing list feature from SourceHut[1], with each post on a blog having their own list and using the In-Reply-To and Message-Id headers. SourceHut already exposes forms that sends emails to mailing lists and is open source, so I guess someone could probably look into their implementation to make this happen. Honestly, I would pay a good amount of money to licence something simple like this on a per-website basis, as long as the code is open source and the back-end is self-hostable—extra points if the developer includes a well-written WordPress plugin. I might look into writing a WordPress plugin that implements this idea. However, because I really like the idea and working with email in general—in no small part because of aerc[2]—, I am obviously biased towards it, so my opinion my not be the best one. Heck, maybe there is no market for this at all. The biggest reason why this idea will forever live in a drawer in my mental desk, however, are the privacy and potential GDPR issues; after all, anyone who leaves a comment will now have their email address exposed. I am not sure how to resolve that one. [1] https://sourcehut.org/ https://sourcehut.org/ [2] https://aerc-mail.org/ https://aerc-mail.org/