About Comments

Posted on July 30, 2015 by Collin J. Doering

Currently as some may have noticed, the "See Comments" link under each individual blog post does nothing. This is because I have been struggling to find a good solution to handle comments. Of course many people choose to use Disqus. Unfortunately due to the proprietary nature of Disqus, I refuse to use it (See this). There are some open source solutions including:

Isso

Written in Python.
Supports modern browsers (IE10+, Firefox, Chrome, ...)

Juvia

Written in Ruby
Not maintained

There are quite a few others, though I haven't spent much time investigating them as many of them are incomplete or unmaintained. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6818416 for a decent discussion of "Disqus Alternatives".

I've tried Isso but because my blog is a Single Page Application (SPA) where pages can be addressed directly or using a anchor url. For example, this post can be reached via /#/posts/about-comments.html or /posts/about-comments.html. Forgive my vague explanation, its been a few months since I last played with Isso. Its too bad I couldn't get it to function because from all the open source options, it seems to be the most mature solution.

Another option that came to mind is to use a sub-reddit for my blog and post new threads for each blog post as a way for people to submit comments. I don't like this as the content would then not be hosted on my servers and it would require users to create a account on Reddit. Not to mention the process wouldn't be simple to automate so I'd have to go create a new reddit thread in my sub-reddit every time I submitted a new post.

The last option I've considered is just foregoing comments all together. Personally, I rarely leave comments on blogs and if I'm interested in getting a hold of someone I generally prefer to use email.

What do you think? Feel free to email me at collin.doering@rekahsoft.ca with any comments and/or suggestions. Anyways, over the next while I hope to find a solution, but for the time being use email or IRC if you wish to contact me.