7 ms·

Various ways to include comments on a static site (2018)

109 points by darekkay 5y ago

foxhop 5y ago
I'm the founder of Remarkbox. I want to make it clear why I went to a pay-what-you-can model, including free: https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can.html https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can....
- darekkay 5y ago
  Thanks for this post and for providing such a model. I've added a link in the Remarkbox section.
winrid 5y ago
I created FastComments (launched on HN!) and am happy to answer questions. It's a really competitive space... but it's been fun.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ChrisSD 5y ago
On the "no comments" option: > However, you won't be able to build a community with people interacting with one another. I think that building a community and writing articles are different skill sets. Some very successful bloggers ("influencers" in modern slang) are able to do both but that's not the norm for most individuals. Sure, it's fine when you're small and it's just a few people with similar interests. But once your audience starts to grow it can be really hard work to maintain a healthy community.
- ReactiveJelly 5y ago
  I'm in this situation: - I want to start blogging - I don't want to blog if I won't get any feedback on what people like to read - I don't want to admin / moderate comments because it sounds like work - I could rely on Reddit / HN threads, but that means I don't get comment threads until I reach a critical mass of popularity. Faster Than Lime will reach the front page every time, but I won't be putting in his level of effort, so I'll get buried in a couple hours if it even gets shared. I don't even want a community, I just want someone to say, "Hey that's kinda neat". Maybe what I need is self-hosted Medium kudos?
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    Maybe leave an email address for people to contact you? Otherwise you pretty much have to do moderation. Good thing is for a small blog there likely won't be very much!
    - marcosdumay 5y ago
      > Good thing is for a small blog there likely won't be very much! Spam is a large problem on any scale. Unless you use something that filter bots, the size of your blog doesn't matter much.
- b0rsuk 5y ago
  "influencer" is not a fancy word for a blogger. An influencer is an advertiser posing as a blogger. The broader term is "native advertising" - advertisements designed not to look like advertisements.
rockbruno 5y ago
I'm more of the opinion that if you're sharing something, especially in a blog, then you should never add a comment section. People don't comment unless they have a point that they want to put across, which in 99% of the cases will be something negative. Just look at HN and (ugh) Twitter -- almost every discussion revolves around people trying to find things to complain about. I instead share a contact e-mail. This works as a good deterrent to filter the pointless complainers, while still allowing those who truly need to contact me to have a way to do so. EDIT: Just might need to clarify that I don't mean that HN is overwhelmingly negative, just that the comments usually revolve about nitpicking terms and concepts which would fall into the concept of something "negative".
- stavros 5y ago
  I haven't had a positive experience with comments on my site (I took them out the other day) but I also didn't have a negative one. Usually people either posted a comment to thank me, or to note something, or to ask a question. I removed the comments because I realized that they weren't worth the extra JS on the page and hassle of moderation.
- wink 5y ago
  that's a really overly negative view. You can be part of a healthy (small?) community and have normal interaction with your commenters or with the writer, as a commenter. Maybe the trick is to not get to real success numbers, but I could think of dozens of blogs I read with 0-10 comments per post and no discernible amount of trolling, spamming (well, automated tools help ofc) and so on.
  - bovermyer 5y ago
    Comments, in my opinion, add nothing to a site. Most of the time they're just noise. Often, they're a distraction. There's the occasional lucid, intelligent comment that truly elevates a post or inspires someone, but they are by far the rarity. On the other hand, I'm speaking of comments on larger sites, not small blogs. I have no interest in allowing comments on my personal blog. If people want to engage me, they will do so directly.
nixcraft 5y ago
Comments are helpful to get feedback and fix typos on my posts, but I turned it off on my blog after over 100k comments approved manually in the last 20+ years because of a spam issue. I got 400 spam comments per minute despite using the paid version of Akismet and keyword block list on a self-hosted WordPress blog.
- onara 5y ago
  Probably you were targeted if you got 400 spam comments per day. Check out OOPSpam.
conaclos 5y ago
Emails seem a good way to add a commenting system. Most people have an email address, and it is a well-established system. To make public the comments, you can use a public mailing list or rebuild the commented static page upon reception of a comment (email). Of course you have to take care of security threats (HTML injection, ...)
_wldu 5y ago
I have found isso to be good for static sites. It allows posters to remain anonymous (which encourages more open discussions) and is self-hosted and simple. https://posativ.org/isso/ https://posativ.org/isso/
viler 5y ago
I maintain a static blog which is small-time enough, but I did want a comments section - essentially it's the only public way I have to interact with readers directly, since I'm not a fan of the whole social networking thing. Email works, of course, but some form of visible Q&A can be helpful to others too. Back when I set it up, I couldn't find a ready-made solution that looked good enough, so I chose to roll my own (basically an email form plus a hack to extract the json comment data from the message and rebuild the site). Since I'm dealing with a low volume of feedback, I don't have an issue with moderating/approving each comment beforehand, and spam isn't a problem... but this article could sure be helpful if that ever changes.
gerikson 5y ago
I used to have Disqus on my blog but the overhead wasn't worth it. The vanishingly rare times someone has reached out to me it's been via Twitter.
OJFord 5y ago
> Hacker News. Similar to Reddit, but aimed towards a more technical audience. However, you don't get a dedicated space for your links. https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=darekkay.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=darekkay.com (I was going to say 'you do sort of', excepting that you can't stop others' submissions going there - but then I realised that's even more 'control' than Reddit gives you, since it's inherently only your site; if others submitted it it's still your content.)
chrisweekly 5y ago
I discovered https://utteranc.es https://utteranc.es just yesterday. Nice UX, but it's built atop (and requires / supports authN only through) GitHub.
buro9 5y ago
If you're in the UK you may wish to not add comments until after you have read the draft of the UK Online Safety Bill. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/draft-online-safety-bill https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/draft-online-safe... The short of it: You are obliged to support processes to keep people safe, protect vulnerable users, provide complaint processes... and failure to take any of this seriously can have serious financial and legal penalties. The current draft does not differentiate between a hobby static website with comments about Raspberry Pis, and harmful content via Facebook... the penalties are equal if this is a hobby effort or if you're Facebook. It's not a great piece of law even in draft form. PS: @dang this might apply to HN as the definition of a site with links to the UK is merely "a significant number of UK users" without clarity on what defines significant.
- AlgorithmicTime 5y ago
  Good luck prosecuting me with my US hosted site Britoids.
- rswail 5y ago
  Or you might want to check Schedule 1, section 5, which states that commenting is specifically exempt from the regulations and the bill is only in draft: A user-to-user service is exempt if the functionalities of the service are limited, such that users are able to communicate by means of the service only in the following ways— (a) posting comments or reviews relating to content produced and published by the provider of the service (or by a person acting on behalf of the provider of the service); (b) sharing such comments or reviews on a different internet service; (c) expressing a view on such comments or reviews, or on content mentioned in sub-paragraph (a), by means of— (i) applying a “like” or “dislike” button or other button of that nature, (ii) applying an emoji or symbol of any kind, (iii) engaging in yes/no voting, or (iv) rating or scoring the content (or the comments or reviews) in any way (including giving star or numerical ratings)
  - nybble41 5y ago
    > relating to content produced and published by the provider of the service How many places can claim that their comment section can only be used for such comments, and not for any other content? You would need to manually screen everything that was submitted to ensure it didn't stray off-topic.
tomhunters 5y ago
Definitely a great read especially if you're thinking of incorporating a comment section on the website.
edmcnulty101 5y ago
@author. Is there anyway you could put this in a github repo? Or would you give me permission to copy and paste it? I spent an entire morning earlier this week, researching all the different options and the pros/cons of static site commenting, just with google, and discovered this post today and it's way more complete than all of my research. haha This could be a real nice resource for people. Great post.
- darekkay 5y ago
  > Is there anyway you could put this in a github repo? Or would you give me permission to copy and paste it? I once handled such resources in separate repositories (e.g. "best practices", "accessibility notes"), but I've decided to put them under my blog instead. Less maintenance, single place for all my projects. But it's totally fine if you want to maintain such a list yourself! If you don't copy my blog post exactly and maybe include a back link, feel free to do so. (if you do, please share a link, so I can subscribe to changes) > I spent an entire morning earlier this week, researching all the different options and the pros/cons of static site commenting, just with google, and discovered this post today and it's way more complete than all of my research. Thanks! I think the reason is that I wrote this post in 2018 and update it every time I find something new. I've setup HN email notifications for some related keywords (like "Disqus") to learn about new tools and add them to my post.
rswail 5y ago
I'm in the midst of building an internal place for APIs, documentation, etc. It's shared with people we integrate with as well. We use confluence as a wiki internally, which is... OK, but. I'm looking at redoc for the OpenAPI side of things, but would dearly love to be able to attach a static comment link to the elements to allow for questions and responses. We have OAuth in front of it and the audience is controlled, so spam/moderation is not really relevant. Suggestions?
rsync 5y ago
I am confused about the self-hosted section of this document ... If I operate a static site, presumably I am using neither php nor a database ... and I wouldn't add things like that to enable comments. But then how do the comments function ? Are there really javascript-only comment engines that store their data ... in flat files ? I'm not sure that's possible ...
- nybble41 5y ago
  I've used some systems where visitors to the site connect to each over WebRTC to share and synchronize content. The LocalStorage API is generally used on the clients for persistence. One such system is GUN, which even has a brief example[0] demonstrating the core data structure of a blog with a comment section. As you would expect, it's not very stable unless either there is a lot of traffic (constant visitors) to keep the data live or you deploy a dedicated "superpeer" for that purpose. If a new visitor arrives and there are no other peers to synchronize with then they will just see a blank page. [0] https://gun.eco/docs/Design-Examples https://gun.eco/docs/Design-Examples
brundolf 5y ago
I wrote some code for my site that 1) finds the most active link to the post on HN, and 2) uses the HN API to pull in and render its comments at the bottom. The site is statically-rendered, but there's a bit of client-side JS that loads the latest comments when you visit the page. Most of the work is done on the back-end; the front-end just grabs the content and drops it in. Example: https://www.brandons.me/blog/three-types-of-data https://www.brandons.me/blog/three-types-of-data Implementation: https://github.com/brundonsmith/website/blob/master/src/loadHnComments.js https://github.com/brundonsmith/website/blob/master/src/load...

109 points by darekkay 5y ago

I'm the founder of Remarkbox. I want to make it clear why I went to a pay-what-you-can model, including free: https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can.html https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can....

darekkay 5y ago
Thanks for this post and for providing such a model. I've added a link in the Remarkbox section.

winrid 5y ago

I created FastComments (launched on HN!) and am happy to answer questions. It's a really competitive space... but it's been fun.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ChrisSD 5y ago

On the "no comments" option: > However, you won't be able to build a community with people interacting with one another. I think that building a community and writing articles are different skill sets. Some very successful bloggers ("influencers" in modern slang) are able to do both but that's not the norm for most individuals. Sure, it's fine when you're small and it's just a few people with similar interests. But once your audience starts to grow it can be really hard work to maintain a healthy community.

ReactiveJelly 5y ago
I'm in this situation: - I want to start blogging - I don't want to blog if I won't get any feedback on what people like to read - I don't want to admin / moderate comments because it sounds like work - I could rely on Reddit / HN threads, but that means I don't get comment threads until I reach a critical mass of popularity. Faster Than Lime will reach the front page every time, but I won't be putting in his level of effort, so I'll get buried in a couple hours if it even gets shared. I don't even want a community, I just want someone to say, "Hey that's kinda neat". Maybe what I need is self-hosted Medium kudos?
- nicoburns 5y ago
  Maybe leave an email address for people to contact you? Otherwise you pretty much have to do moderation. Good thing is for a small blog there likely won't be very much!
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    > Good thing is for a small blog there likely won't be very much! Spam is a large problem on any scale. Unless you use something that filter bots, the size of your blog doesn't matter much.
b0rsuk 5y ago
"influencer" is not a fancy word for a blogger. An influencer is an advertiser posing as a blogger. The broader term is "native advertising" - advertisements designed not to look like advertisements.

rockbruno 5y ago

I'm more of the opinion that if you're sharing something, especially in a blog, then you should never add a comment section. People don't comment unless they have a point that they want to put across, which in 99% of the cases will be something negative. Just look at HN and (ugh) Twitter -- almost every discussion revolves around people trying to find things to complain about. I instead share a contact e-mail. This works as a good deterrent to filter the pointless complainers, while still allowing those who truly need to contact me to have a way to do so. EDIT: Just might need to clarify that I don't mean that HN is overwhelmingly negative, just that the comments usually revolve about nitpicking terms and concepts which would fall into the concept of something "negative".

stavros 5y ago
I haven't had a positive experience with comments on my site (I took them out the other day) but I also didn't have a negative one. Usually people either posted a comment to thank me, or to note something, or to ask a question. I removed the comments because I realized that they weren't worth the extra JS on the page and hassle of moderation.
wink 5y ago
that's a really overly negative view. You can be part of a healthy (small?) community and have normal interaction with your commenters or with the writer, as a commenter. Maybe the trick is to not get to real success numbers, but I could think of dozens of blogs I read with 0-10 comments per post and no discernible amount of trolling, spamming (well, automated tools help ofc) and so on.
- bovermyer 5y ago
  Comments, in my opinion, add nothing to a site. Most of the time they're just noise. Often, they're a distraction. There's the occasional lucid, intelligent comment that truly elevates a post or inspires someone, but they are by far the rarity. On the other hand, I'm speaking of comments on larger sites, not small blogs. I have no interest in allowing comments on my personal blog. If people want to engage me, they will do so directly.

nixcraft 5y ago

Comments are helpful to get feedback and fix typos on my posts, but I turned it off on my blog after over 100k comments approved manually in the last 20+ years because of a spam issue. I got 400 spam comments per minute despite using the paid version of Akismet and keyword block list on a self-hosted WordPress blog.

onara 5y ago
Probably you were targeted if you got 400 spam comments per day. Check out OOPSpam.

conaclos 5y ago

Emails seem a good way to add a commenting system. Most people have an email address, and it is a well-established system. To make public the comments, you can use a public mailing list or rebuild the commented static page upon reception of a comment (email). Of course you have to take care of security threats (HTML injection, ...)

_wldu 5y ago

I have found isso to be good for static sites. It allows posters to remain anonymous (which encourages more open discussions) and is self-hosted and simple. https://posativ.org/isso/ https://posativ.org/isso/

viler 5y ago

I maintain a static blog which is small-time enough, but I did want a comments section - essentially it's the only public way I have to interact with readers directly, since I'm not a fan of the whole social networking thing. Email works, of course, but some form of visible Q&A can be helpful to others too. Back when I set it up, I couldn't find a ready-made solution that looked good enough, so I chose to roll my own (basically an email form plus a hack to extract the json comment data from the message and rebuild the site). Since I'm dealing with a low volume of feedback, I don't have an issue with moderating/approving each comment beforehand, and spam isn't a problem... but this article could sure be helpful if that ever changes.

gerikson 5y ago

I used to have Disqus on my blog but the overhead wasn't worth it. The vanishingly rare times someone has reached out to me it's been via Twitter.

OJFord 5y ago

> Hacker News. Similar to Reddit, but aimed towards a more technical audience. However, you don't get a dedicated space for your links. https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=darekkay.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=darekkay.com (I was going to say 'you do sort of', excepting that you can't stop others' submissions going there - but then I realised that's even more 'control' than Reddit gives you, since it's inherently only your site; if others submitted it it's still your content.)

chrisweekly 5y ago

I discovered https://utteranc.es https://utteranc.es just yesterday. Nice UX, but it's built atop (and requires / supports authN only through) GitHub.

buro9 5y ago

If you're in the UK you may wish to not add comments until after you have read the draft of the UK Online Safety Bill. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/draft-online-safety-bill https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/draft-online-safe... The short of it: You are obliged to support processes to keep people safe, protect vulnerable users, provide complaint processes... and failure to take any of this seriously can have serious financial and legal penalties. The current draft does not differentiate between a hobby static website with comments about Raspberry Pis, and harmful content via Facebook... the penalties are equal if this is a hobby effort or if you're Facebook. It's not a great piece of law even in draft form. PS: @dang this might apply to HN as the definition of a site with links to the UK is merely "a significant number of UK users" without clarity on what defines significant.

AlgorithmicTime 5y ago
Good luck prosecuting me with my US hosted site Britoids.
rswail 5y ago
Or you might want to check Schedule 1, section 5, which states that commenting is specifically exempt from the regulations and the bill is only in draft: A user-to-user service is exempt if the functionalities of the service are limited, such that users are able to communicate by means of the service only in the following ways— (a) posting comments or reviews relating to content produced and published by the provider of the service (or by a person acting on behalf of the provider of the service); (b) sharing such comments or reviews on a different internet service; (c) expressing a view on such comments or reviews, or on content mentioned in sub-paragraph (a), by means of— (i) applying a “like” or “dislike” button or other button of that nature, (ii) applying an emoji or symbol of any kind, (iii) engaging in yes/no voting, or (iv) rating or scoring the content (or the comments or reviews) in any way (including giving star or numerical ratings)
- nybble41 5y ago
  > relating to content produced and published by the provider of the service How many places can claim that their comment section can only be used for such comments, and not for any other content? You would need to manually screen everything that was submitted to ensure it didn't stray off-topic.

tomhunters 5y ago

Definitely a great read especially if you're thinking of incorporating a comment section on the website.

edmcnulty101 5y ago

@author. Is there anyway you could put this in a github repo? Or would you give me permission to copy and paste it? I spent an entire morning earlier this week, researching all the different options and the pros/cons of static site commenting, just with google, and discovered this post today and it's way more complete than all of my research. haha This could be a real nice resource for people. Great post.

darekkay 5y ago
> Is there anyway you could put this in a github repo? Or would you give me permission to copy and paste it? I once handled such resources in separate repositories (e.g. "best practices", "accessibility notes"), but I've decided to put them under my blog instead. Less maintenance, single place for all my projects. But it's totally fine if you want to maintain such a list yourself! If you don't copy my blog post exactly and maybe include a back link, feel free to do so. (if you do, please share a link, so I can subscribe to changes) > I spent an entire morning earlier this week, researching all the different options and the pros/cons of static site commenting, just with google, and discovered this post today and it's way more complete than all of my research. Thanks! I think the reason is that I wrote this post in 2018 and update it every time I find something new. I've setup HN email notifications for some related keywords (like "Disqus") to learn about new tools and add them to my post.

rswail 5y ago

I'm in the midst of building an internal place for APIs, documentation, etc. It's shared with people we integrate with as well. We use confluence as a wiki internally, which is... OK, but. I'm looking at redoc for the OpenAPI side of things, but would dearly love to be able to attach a static comment link to the elements to allow for questions and responses. We have OAuth in front of it and the audience is controlled, so spam/moderation is not really relevant. Suggestions?

rsync 5y ago

I am confused about the self-hosted section of this document ... If I operate a static site, presumably I am using neither php nor a database ... and I wouldn't add things like that to enable comments. But then how do the comments function ? Are there really javascript-only comment engines that store their data ... in flat files ? I'm not sure that's possible ...

nybble41 5y ago
I've used some systems where visitors to the site connect to each over WebRTC to share and synchronize content. The LocalStorage API is generally used on the clients for persistence. One such system is GUN, which even has a brief example[0] demonstrating the core data structure of a blog with a comment section. As you would expect, it's not very stable unless either there is a lot of traffic (constant visitors) to keep the data live or you deploy a dedicated "superpeer" for that purpose. If a new visitor arrives and there are no other peers to synchronize with then they will just see a blank page. [0] https://gun.eco/docs/Design-Examples https://gun.eco/docs/Design-Examples

brundolf 5y ago

I wrote some code for my site that 1) finds the most active link to the post on HN, and 2) uses the HN API to pull in and render its comments at the bottom. The site is statically-rendered, but there's a bit of client-side JS that loads the latest comments when you visit the page. Most of the work is done on the back-end; the front-end just grabs the content and drops it in. Example: https://www.brandons.me/blog/three-types-of-data https://www.brandons.me/blog/three-types-of-data Implementation: https://github.com/brundonsmith/website/blob/master/src/loadHnComments.js https://github.com/brundonsmith/website/blob/master/src/load...