Show HN: Replacing WordPress with GitHub Issues-like Blog Comments | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Replacing WordPress with GitHub Issues-like Blog Comments

dmitri.shuralyov.com

90 pointsshurcooL21 comments

The original https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14170041 was much more about how Disqus was awful, not much about how GitHub Issues comments are a great solution. They're not. There are much better solutions than GitHub Issues comments.

That's true, Discus is pretty bad. That said, I really enjoy GitHub Issues-like comments. They're simple and get the job done just right.

But you need the commenter to have a GitHub account.

Yeah, that's not too bad anyway. Otherwise you would need them to have an account on your site, or on Disqus.

Yep. My target audience has a GitHub account already, and I'd rather not force them to create yet another account on my personal site just to comment or leave a reaction.

It also works well as a quality filter. People with a GitHub account will be much more responsible with their words, compared to anaonymous posters or throwaway accounts, since they have a professional reputation to maintain.

And it rules out those pesky commenters that care about things like privacy and avoiding the centralization of open source development and shoveling everything into 'the cloud'.

Now that's a feature I'd get behind: the ability to select out people I'd rather not talk to.

The one you mention is a nice positive effect.

I made the same with Hacker News comments: https://comments.network/

Just add it and get automatic comments from HN right in your blog/page. However I'm discontinuing it soon after HN asked me to do so, but it shouldn't be too difficult for anyone motivated to do their own.

If HN asked you to discontinue it, shouldn't others avoid doing it also?

IANAL. IMHO That is up to each individual's decision. I actually asked them and they said they really don't want other people to embed comments on their website. BUT a case could be made about fair use, embedabble content and the fact that there is no effective terms and conditions on HN, just a FAQ (so I think they don't have the exclusive copyright of the comments). Plus the whole YCombinator ethos of asking for forgiveness instead of permission.

So I am discontinuing it just because HN is awesome and they asked nicely. But other people might consider things differently.

But I guess he meant morally, rather than technically.

And who am I to judge the morality of other people in different cultures? What is legal and moral in a country is totally dependent on the culture and many times it has little to do with legality.

What was the reason given?

See my other comment besides

I'd be tempted to use Firebase as a backend instead: simple integration with the browser, built-in auth using facebook, google and others, and no need to create a github issue for each post.

That sounded logical, so I searched a bit, and there's several good resources. The two that stood out to me:

This article goes through making a very basic interface, and is easy to follow...ended with 31 lines of js. It isn't production ready, but was a good intro: https://css-tricks.com/building-a-jekyll-site-part-3-of-3/

Then, a more complete implementation. Hasn't been updated for a few years, but has markdown support, up/down voting, flagging, etc: https://commented.github.io/

It's great... the only drawback is that the solution is exclusive to GitHub users only.

Thanks. That's the case now, but it doesn't have to be.

I could add Google, Facebook, my own accounts (username/password), or other ways for people to authenticate with.

I chose not to do that, and stick with GitHub auth only for now, because it covers my current needs. My target audience mostly has an account on GitHub. Also, when a website has many ways to login, it's hard to remember which you've used previously.

I'm still focused on delivering comments from a client side option, so that my site can be delivered using a static approach. Disqus is a bit bulky but does meet that requirement still.

Smart idea - got me curious about what else I can do with the github api

Besides the login, this isn't using the GH API at all for what it's worth.

This is true.

Package githubapi uses the GitHub API [1], but that package is not currently used on my site.

[1] https://godoc.org/github.com/shurcooL/issues/githubapi

Reply on news.ycombinator.com