Just a note about your site: the “At least this isn’t a full screen popup”-popup captures keyboard input, so if you’re scrolling with the keyboard you need to deselect it before continuing. Pretty annoying, IMHO.
I’ve been of the opinion that in the cases where comments actually add something meaningful and their author cares enough, they can just email me and I’ll publish their comment manually, as part of the article text.
That seems like a more useful deal for both me and my readers.
I’m not specifically against different opinions than mine, simply opening up my place on the internet to being a public forum is not something I want. If someone wishes to give feedback, then it is possible to find the ways for that. This hurdle is too much for most spammers or not constructive discourses to be kept away from me.
I mean, I agree, but I added this explanation to my blog 5 years ago and have yet to get a single comment emailed in. Maybe my blog just isn’t interesting enough.
I did get an email from someone offering a “correction” to my book-reading list page where he noticed duplicate entries and didn’t realize that people read books more than once on purpose.
+1 for utteranc.es - deployed it on theta.eu.org, and it works rather well! (especially since you get an email from GH anyway on new issues, which is good)
I wonder if it’s possible to leverage Twitter as a sort of comments section. Once you publish an article you post a link on Twitter, then embed that tweet into the page along with its replies.
Of course embedding a tweet will come with its own bloat which doesn’t solve OPs issues (including privacy), but it could be an interesting alternative to using Disqus.
It’s probably better to just link to the tweet and have people go to Twitter to respond.
I thought about this, and I think the only suitable way of doing it, would be to have a script to add in each blog page, that loads a server-side program.
The deploy script would publish on Twitter/Mastodon/others and save the social network links to a database (like in a text file in the blog repository itself, for easy backup?) so that the server-side program is able to check and load comments on the blog page.
But you’ll have to deal with moderation. That’s why I didn’t code that although I got the idea. If you want to accept or refuse comments before they are shown on your blog, you can also use that time to copy and paste comments from these social networks manually, or use a script just for that task.
You don’t control twitter, and you shouldn’t trust twitter not to censor your comments about your blog, or other people’s comments about your blog, on their platform. Twitter does this all the time for all sorts of reasons. This policy also forces any potential commenters to have a twitter account, which means they have to either give twitter their phone number, or go to some effort to spoof one. There was one time when I wanted to talk to someone I knew from university years ago after seeing a blog post of theirs. Their only public contact information was twitter, and trying to sign up for twitter in order to send them a brief hello was how I discovered the phone number thing.
The requirement for having a Twitter account is a valid concern.
On the other hand, anyone who allows completely anonymous comments is asking for trouble. When I used Disqus, commenters had to have a Disqus identity (which is separate from an account, you could auth with other services - part of Disqus’ value-add).
Twitter is a bad example for this, for many reasons, but I personally would not have any problems enforcing that commenters to my blog had to have a Github account, for example. This is similar to my personal informal requirements for extending a Lobsters invite.
Just remember that any external service that you outsource your commenting authorization to is an external service that could screw with your potential commenters in any way they like. If you believe that Github will always make exactly the same decisions about who they will allow on their service as you will about who you will allow to comment on your blog, then you have more faith in Github than I do.
Interesting, because “Commento” uses “commento” as a base class name (and not e.g. the more common “comment” or “comments” etc) it doesn’t get blocked by the default 1Blocker “block comments” rule.
As a reader, I find comments on blogs to often be pointless: it’s generally either abusive shit, or an echo chamber. If I were authoring, I’d essentially be in the same position. The comments on most sites are generally garbage. This is where communities like Lobste.rs come into their own: you have a group of people who are here specifically for (generally) acceptable discourse about a variety of vaguely related topics.
The solution I eventually landed on was to just have tiny icons to HN/lobste.rs/reddit/wherever I posted it; not those position: fixed social icons which almost (or entirely) cover the text like news sites tend to have, just small icons at the top like this: https://mort.coffee/home/obscure-c-features/
If I were to have comments on the page itself, I would definitely use Commento, but I know with myself that I’ve switched from mainly reading comments on the blogs to mainly reading the comments on whatever content aggregator I found the article on.
Just a note about your site: the “At least this isn’t a full screen popup”-popup captures keyboard input, so if you’re scrolling with the keyboard you need to deselect it before continuing. Pretty annoying, IMHO.
This is definitely one of those websites where disabling JS results in a much better/usable experience.
hey, thanks for the feedback - you’re definitely right. I’ve removed that.
Your at least it’s not all bad popup still hijacks my spacebar and prevents me from reading to the end of your post.
good point, I’ve removed that.
I don’t have comments on my blog. I don’t need other people’s opinion there. That place is for my opinion.
This also saves me from fighting spam, from assisting anybody tracking my visitors, and also for aving to replace by and advising others to do so.
I’ve been of the opinion that in the cases where comments actually add something meaningful and their author cares enough, they can just email me and I’ll publish their comment manually, as part of the article text.
That seems like a more useful deal for both me and my readers.
I agree.
I’m not specifically against different opinions than mine, simply opening up my place on the internet to being a public forum is not something I want. If someone wishes to give feedback, then it is possible to find the ways for that. This hurdle is too much for most spammers or not constructive discourses to be kept away from me.
I mean, I agree, but I added this explanation to my blog 5 years ago and have yet to get a single comment emailed in. Maybe my blog just isn’t interesting enough.
I did get an email from someone offering a “correction” to my book-reading list page where he noticed duplicate entries and didn’t realize that people read books more than once on purpose.
The value-add of Disqus is that they take care of spam (it’s a centralized service a bit like Gmail).
If I had to have comments enabled (for business reasons) I’d be happy to use a service like Disqus.
For a business Disqus can be a reasonable choice. Most business track their users heavily anyways.
If you’re on the lookout for an alternative, I’d suggest utterances. It’s pretty nifty, uses the GitHub Issues API to manage comments and discussions.
+1 for utteranc.es - deployed it on theta.eu.org, and it works rather well! (especially since you get an email from GH anyway on new issues, which is good)
I removed Disqus because I might have gotten 3 comments in total during the time I had it.
If someone wants to discuss something on my blog, they can DM me on Twitter ;)
I wonder if it’s possible to leverage Twitter as a sort of comments section. Once you publish an article you post a link on Twitter, then embed that tweet into the page along with its replies.
Of course embedding a tweet will come with its own bloat which doesn’t solve OPs issues (including privacy), but it could be an interesting alternative to using Disqus.
It’s probably better to just link to the tweet and have people go to Twitter to respond.
I thought about this, and I think the only suitable way of doing it, would be to have a script to add in each blog page, that loads a server-side program.
The deploy script would publish on Twitter/Mastodon/others and save the social network links to a database (like in a text file in the blog repository itself, for easy backup?) so that the server-side program is able to check and load comments on the blog page.
But you’ll have to deal with moderation. That’s why I didn’t code that although I got the idea. If you want to accept or refuse comments before they are shown on your blog, you can also use that time to copy and paste comments from these social networks manually, or use a script just for that task.
You don’t control twitter, and you shouldn’t trust twitter not to censor your comments about your blog, or other people’s comments about your blog, on their platform. Twitter does this all the time for all sorts of reasons. This policy also forces any potential commenters to have a twitter account, which means they have to either give twitter their phone number, or go to some effort to spoof one. There was one time when I wanted to talk to someone I knew from university years ago after seeing a blog post of theirs. Their only public contact information was twitter, and trying to sign up for twitter in order to send them a brief hello was how I discovered the phone number thing.
The requirement for having a Twitter account is a valid concern.
On the other hand, anyone who allows completely anonymous comments is asking for trouble. When I used Disqus, commenters had to have a Disqus identity (which is separate from an account, you could auth with other services - part of Disqus’ value-add).
Twitter is a bad example for this, for many reasons, but I personally would not have any problems enforcing that commenters to my blog had to have a Github account, for example. This is similar to my personal informal requirements for extending a Lobsters invite.
Just remember that any external service that you outsource your commenting authorization to is an external service that could screw with your potential commenters in any way they like. If you believe that Github will always make exactly the same decisions about who they will allow on their service as you will about who you will allow to comment on your blog, then you have more faith in Github than I do.
Maybe… with some hacky plumbing that would be removed the next time Twitter decides to change their API…
I guess an IFTTT to publish a tweet, then a link to that “discuss this article on Twitter!” would work, for some values of work.
I have this on my todo list for some time already for my blog.
An alternative I am considering is isso. Also open source and is self hosted iirc.
Interesting, because “Commento” uses “commento” as a base class name (and not e.g. the more common “comment” or “comments” etc) it doesn’t get blocked by the default 1Blocker “block comments” rule.
As a reader, I find comments on blogs to often be pointless: it’s generally either abusive shit, or an echo chamber. If I were authoring, I’d essentially be in the same position. The comments on most sites are generally garbage. This is where communities like Lobste.rs come into their own: you have a group of people who are here specifically for (generally) acceptable discourse about a variety of vaguely related topics.
It’s threads like these where I question that.
The solution I eventually landed on was to just have tiny icons to HN/lobste.rs/reddit/wherever I posted it; not those
position: fixedsocial icons which almost (or entirely) cover the text like news sites tend to have, just small icons at the top like this: https://mort.coffee/home/obscure-c-features/If I were to have comments on the page itself, I would definitely use Commento, but I know with myself that I’ve switched from mainly reading comments on the blogs to mainly reading the comments on whatever content aggregator I found the article on.
Oh good, please are looking at the problem and have solved it.