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Comment by foxhop | Hacker News Reader

Sort of related and shameless plug but I'm building a "comments as a service" application that isn't disqus. My first target market is static sites.

Check it out here: http://www.remarkbox.com

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Also sort of a related, shameless plug--

I've been working on Formingo (https://www.formingo.co), a form processing service for static sites so you can receive your form submissions directly to your email without the need for server side code or your own backend.

I've actually had a couple people ask me about comment systems that were an alternative to (and more simple than) Disqus, so it's cool to see someone working in that space.

This is cool. When do you plan to have paid plans available?

I'm working on some Jekyll landing pages and I need form options for people.

Not sure at this point. If you need more than the default 500 submissions per month, shoot me an email (andrew@ the Formingo domain) and I can hook you up ;) (same goes for anyone else reading).

I'm working on expanding the service a bit before I get into paid plans or anything. The drag and drop form builder is coming soon, which will also work with static sites (using JS to embed the form, and eventually have a couple other options such as just generating the HTML for you so JS isn't required for your visitors)

Your API is exactly what I would expect to see from such a service. Your pricing is also exactly what I would expect to see, so props.

I only need a POST endpoint that will accept a few parameters and redirect back to my success page, and I will definitely keep your service in mind for that.

Although, how do you keep everyone from sending spam from you?

Right now there's domain and email verification so that you don't get spammed from people taking your form and embedding it into their website, but I have some upcoming plans for spam detection.

In fact, the first parts of this system is in place already-- if you have an account and create a pre-validated form, you can go into your dashboard to see the responses and mark them as spam. This will become the training data for the spam filter at a future point in time.

Ah, I more meant "how do you make sure people don't send spam to arbitrary destinations sending your form", but I see you're doing email verification of the recipient first. I thought "put this form on your site" was literally all there was, at first, hence the question.

I see-- yes, when you embed a new form, you receive a verification email for the page URL-email combination. Meaning if you change the email address or use the form on another URL, you get another verification email.

If you register for an account, however, you can bypass this and pre-register your domains and verify your email address and get a special URL without your email address in it (it's an arbitrary token).

This is our solution to this problem. Our service is a general purpose "sql database over cors and https", posting forms with captcha is the archetypical use case. It is more low level and requires some coding. Let us know, we're happy to help out!

https://www.lite-engine.com/blog/post_form.html

Formingo looks good. But one thing I'd like is the ability to hide my email address so it doesn't get picked up by spammers. The current setup shows the address plainly in the page source. Could the action field take some sort of identifier number or hash, as in:

/submit/12345

Then your system looks up 12345 and sees it means john@example.com.

You can sign up (https://www.formingo.co/register) for a free account that lets you create forms that hide your email address (along with pre-verify your email address and domains so you don't have to click a verification link every time you add a form to a new URL/email address combo) :)

Thanks Andrew. I was just looking at the intro example on https://www.formingo.co/create-a-form and didn't dig deeper. I'm glad I asked. I'll give it a try.

For anyone comparing options, I've also been using formspree.io for this purpose for quite awhile and it's worked great for me.

I wrote a self-hosted static-comment system here:

* https://github.com/skx/e-comments/

Seems mine is more basic than yours, due to lack of registration and lack of threading though.

Since we're shameless pluggin', I have a Jekyll plugin that will display an image gallery from a folder (with a single liquid tag).

https://github.com/callmeed/jekyll-image-set

No online sample or demo?

This looks nice. Disqus placed ads on our sites for the second time recently, which was the last straw. I've already got a backlog task in place to find an alternative, and I'm adding Remarkbox to the list.

Tried it, liked it. How do you stop spam, link farming, etc.?

Can I tack on a shameless plug too?

For people who like Jekyll but want multiple sites with the same code base:

https://github.com/sumdog/jekyll-multisite/

It's pretty alpha and I'm currently working on a full set of test cases so I can merge in some incoming pull requests. But I use it for all my sites.

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