How to self-host comments on your otherwise static blog?

There's an open source version of https://commento.io/ for self-hosting a comment system. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19210697 lists several others like https://github.com/posativ/isso

I would instead of hosting comments on the site itself offload comments to Twitter/HN and link to it from the article like https://overreacted.io

I wrote a self-hosted "comment server" a few years back, but in the end found it was more annoying than useful.

In the end I just setup a simple CGI script which takes each submitted comment, writes it to /srv/comments/pending/ and then sends me an email.

When I rebuild the blog all the comments from /srv/comments/approved are automatically inserted at the foot of the appropriate post. I have a manual step where I move the comments into the right directory "/approved" vs "/spam".

It isn't ideal, but it is simple, reliable, and works well at the level of scale I deal with at https://blog.steve.fi/

The best balance of usability, Freedom, and civility for me has been relying on people to email me, then sometimes—and with permission—edit their comment into my posts/pages.

I changed my blog to be static. I don't trust any of these embedded comment systems, and don't don't want to risk the legal burden of hosting comments myself. I killed off a small community this way, which felt not great :(

I guess it was assumed that a GDPR-compliant software infrastructure would be able to grow from the ashes, but I haven't been following, and don't know what the state of the art is. It seems people mostly offload to other platform (twitter/discord) rather than host themselves now?

I miss when websites were more participatory - I respect + envy people who still do blogs with lively comment threads.

Another option is to host the comments in Github/Gitlab issues. There are several plugins that allow users to login using OAuth and post comments.

Gitalk is one of them: https://github.com/gitalk/gitalk/

Vssue supports both GitHub and GitLab, and allows users to edit and delete their comments: https://vssue.js.org/

And there is also Gitment: https://github.com/imsun/gitment

As someone who has been through this process, I strongly agree with the advice of Lammy and nikivi posted in this thread.

Unless you have a high-traffic blog with lots of user engagement, I think it's best to keep your blog clean and handle comments/feedback elsewhere.

It would be nice if there were a service where people could write their comments and have them expire after, say 24 hours, but the blogger could run a script which downloads them before that happens. By having a local copy of the comments, the blogger could check them and include the approved ones into their static content.

Each comment would be associated with a salted hash based on either an IP address (for anonymous comments) or an account on a social login provider (like Google or Facebook). By default, a user could only post 1 comment every 24 hours, but the blogger could then publish a whitelist of people who are exempt from that restriction.

If this were an open standard, then the blogger could switch their comment provider at a moment's notice, without losing any data.

https://schnack.cool/

Easy: https://github.com/glosa/glosa-server

Use Webmention W3C standard and the free service at https://webmention.io/

Webmention works like this: Someone writes a reply on their blog and then sends you a Webmention. You can add it to your site or do whatever with it. It’s decentralized and there’s no vendor lock-in.

See it in action here: https://aaronparecki.com/2020/05/04/10/

You can even use services like https://brid.gy to back feed Twitter comments into Webmentions.

I haven't tried it yet, but I came across Staticman which seems really cool: https://staticman.net/

Netlify also provides support for forms which could be used to accomplish this.

Can't speak to the GDPR aspect, but I don't imagine it would be much of an issue for just saving and displaying comments.

I switched from Isso to Commento, but the latter has had an open bug that prevents login for almost a year:

https://gitlab.com/commento/commento/-/issues/174

For my site, I think I might as well not add comments at all, as I haven't found them to be terribly useful. The most useful discussion happens on HN, Twitter/Mastodon and email.

Plug for the platform that I work on, Coral[0]. We support newsrooms in many regions (including those that need to be GDPR compliant). You can self host the application on Heroku pretty easily with the button or run on a server if you like too.

[0]: https://docs.coralproject.net/talk/

I had a blog with comments. But spam made it painful to administer. Almost nothing beats spam except for very sophisticated captchas but then normal people also have trouble writing comments. So I have no comments on my blog now. If you want to "comment" you'll have to email me directly.

Well it's not self-hosted, but I made [1] YComments to allow hacker news comments on a static website.

[1] https://ycomments.benwinding.com/

That’s actually a good question. Yes hosting static htmls have been super easy for a decade. (Might have been getting harder recently actually lol) But managing comments always have been a headache.

I would add utterances [0], even if its not self-hosted.

[0] https://github.com/utterance/utterances

Come on people, the OP asked for a self-hosted comments solution. The number of OT replies is excessive, particularly when the same OT reply is repeated by several people.

I have built it myself using websockets. Wasn't that that hard or bad. https://worktheme.com

Happy to answer questions.

Anything for inline comments / annotations?

I'd be far more worried about spam and malicious content than GDPR. Always assume someone will be trying to cram ads, pornography, and viruses into anything you create that allows user content.

My blog is decently high-traffic and has been static/Pelican for several years.

After using Disqus for a while I decided to drop comments entirely because they're more trouble than they're worth. A quick write up about it -- https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2018/turning-off-blog-comments...

TL;DR: don't.

I thought once of using NNTP for comments (the blog messages themself can also be readable with NNTP). You can have a link from a static web page to separate page that displays read-only comments, and has instructions to post (you could also use iframe, although I do not recommend that; a normal link would do better, I think). That is what I wanted to do, at least.

(I don't know about GDPR, though, sorry)

How about telling your users to post on github/gitlab issues if they have something valid to add?

There's also Talkyard Blog Comments: https://www.talkyard.io/blog-comments

GDPR: People can download their personal data, and delete their own accounts, via their user profile pages.

No ads, no tracking. Open source. (I develop Talkyard.)

AFAIK, GDPR only really becomes an issue for you, if your blog crosses a certain threshhold of views/comments.

Not sure where I read it, but it was in the range of something around 10,000 per day/week/month.

Definitely not something to crack your head over, if you just want to host a personal blog (unless you're a celebrity?).

SOURCE: I self-host a personal blog in Germany, and had read up on it a year or two ago.

There is another tool call disqus. It's free and is really easy to integrate into your own page. You can check that out on my blog page.

https://blog.phuaxueyong.com/post/2020-05-03-3-more-cloud-de...

Disqus was baked into the template I used for my blog so I kept it: https://thoughts.willcipriano.com/weird-python-tricks/

It works well and is simple to implement.