Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

bad_user

Any alternatives to Disqus for personal blogs?

View on HN

Also Talk [1], which you can self host! (Disclaimer, engineer on the team!)

[1]: https://github.com/coralproject/talk

Cheers, I've used it on WashPo and thought it was a great experience as an end-user.

Yes, Isso [1] if you can self host. Whilst it doesn't track you like Disqus, it does have issues. For one you must have unsafe-eval in your CSP policy. That's something I'm not very fond of, so I've started to build an alternative: Oration [2], but it's not ready just yet.

[1] - https://posativ.org/isso/ [2] - https://github.com/Libbum/oration

I looked into this recently--Isso is heavily tied to sqlite w/o good reason. I would not recommend from a high availability or even simple backup perspective.

The other key feature I'm curious about w/ Disqus alternatives is spam filter performance. Isso does not have any besides manual curation of comments.

Both points you make are certainly valid. I'd say that Isso really targets low readership blogs that do just fine on a cheap unmanaged VPS instance though, so a high availability alternative isn't a requirement for that demographic.

Unfortunately this also rolls over to the spam filter portion. There were discussions in the bug tracker about this a while back, where the main Isso dev stated that it's a mostly obscure piece of software and spammers are not currently targeting it, so why bother worrying...

sqlite3 is really easy to backup. You can dump out SQL or just copy the .sqlite files.

Scaling it horizontally is where is starts to get tricky.

https://staticman.net/ if the idea of having static comments is a plus for you.

There's always Echo Chamber: https://github.com/tessalt/echo-chamber-js

I wrote a self-hosted alternative:

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

You can see the demo-page here:

* https://tweaked.io/guide/demo/

Let me be silly: go back to the nineties.

Provide your email address as an image, receive the comments in your inbox, append the really interesting ones to your blog article.

You really want to remove the spam and will have to do some moderation in order to keep your comments feed clean and interesting anyway. Making it a bit more difficult for your readers to comment has the advantageous effect that they'll think twice before writing. Moreover it also changes the way they write, because now they are addressing to a specific person instead of talking to everyone.

For sure it will probably drastically reduce the number of comments you get, but which one do you prefer: quantity or quality?

Putting your email in an image is a hassle for the user. A better option is to wrap a link in javascript that "constructs" your email from an encoded string and sets the link's href to the appropriate mailto on hover. This is user friendly but incredibly hard to harvest in an automated fashion.

Provide a form so people can write to you without disclosing their email or even having one.

As a self hosted blogger who uses Jekyll to build the site, and Emacs to do email, that sounds like a workflow that would be easy to automate.

Old mate at plogging dev is working on one as we speak. He got a bit of traction here a while ago (can't find link)

Blog here: https://www.ploggingdev.com/

Thanks for the mention, I just deployed the code : https://www.hostedcomments.com/

Demo page where you can comment : https://www.ploggingdev.com/2017/08/building-a-disqus-altern...

I'm building a Disqus alternative called Remarkbox.

You should add your list to the private beta to join the other active testers.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com