Isso – a commenting server similar to Disqus | Hacker News Reader

Isso – a commenting server similar to Disqus

github.com

119 pointslobo_tuerto51 comments

The topic of Disqus alternatives comes up every once in a while on HN, so I was thinking about inviting the people working on Disqus alternatives to my chat room and have a conversation about their projects and the comments space in general and write a lightly edited blog post based on the chat. Here are some of the people I plan to talk to:

* `foxhop of https://www.remarkbox.com/

* `adtac of https://github.com/adtac/commento

* `KajMagnus of https://www.effectivediscussions.org/

* The person behind Isso

* The person behind https://github.com/schn4ck/schnack

* Aja of Civil Comments (it shut down recently https://medium.com/@aja_15265/saying-goodbye-to-civil-commen... )

* And of course, my own https://www.hostedcomments.com/

We actually had the first discussion in the chat room (though we went off topic very quickly), you can read it here https://www.hackerschat.net/topics/general/chat/archive/?dat...

There are a few opinions people have about this space, some feel going ad-supported is the only way, others feel bootstrapped operations are sustainable and there are others who feel there's no money in this space. If you have any questions that you would like me to ask the people mentioned above let me know here or in my chat room https://www.hackerschat.net/

That sounds like it will be an extremely interesting post, I'm looking forward to it.

I can chime in with an anecdote about the first one on your list, RemarkBox [1]. We've been using it as the comment system on the Intoli Blog, and we couldn't be happier [2]. We first heard about RemarkBox from one of foxhop's posts here on Hacker News that we happened to see right around the time that we were thinking about adding comments to the blog anyway. We liked the idea of working with a smaller company instead of Disqus, so we got in touch and signed up to be what I suspect was one of the site's first paying customers.

The reason that I feel compelled to mention this here isn't that the comment system has worked well for us—although it has—but rather that it has been a real pleasure to communicate with foxhop and to be involved with RemarkBox at this relatively early stage. He's been extremely responsive to our feature requests, wishes us congratulations when one of our articles does well, lets us know if we forget to approve a comment, etc. Overall, it's just been a really pleasant experience. Definitely check them out if you're thinking about adding comments to your site!

[1] https://www.remarkbox.com/

[2] https://intoli.com/blog

Thank you for the kind words, it really means a lot!

One of my long term goals with Remarkbox is to be more then just a "comment system". I want the Remarkbox brand to act like part of the customer's team.

I want to help find solutions to help the customer win at whatever they are trying to accomplish.

Yes, you are customer number 2 and I'm very grateful for that!

Nice work. It would be nice if you could provide your potential customers with a minimal comment page demo.

I am always interested in how resource intensive (in terms of CSS/JS size) is the commenting system itself.

Thank you for the suggestion. Do you mean like the demo on the bottom of the homepage, or something else?

Yes, like the one on the bottom on the page but on a separate page with minimal styling. I would like to know the size of JS/CSS I would have to include on my site to implement a commenting system.

edit: Something like https://commento.adtac.pw/

Here you are, I think this is what you mean: https://www.remarkbox.com/minimal-demo.html

Do any of these options provide a way to import existing site comments from Disqus? That's my main hesitation with replacement because I don't want to lose previously good discussions.

Have you checked the submitted URL of the thread? Because:

> Disqus & WordPress Import

> You can migrate your Disqus/WordPress comments without any hassle.

Somehow...I didn’t see that. Thanks.

Hi there - Andrew from The Coral Project's Talk platform (https://coralproject.github.io/talk/)

We've developed a Disqus importer. We just deprecated it so we can tidy it up, but it's only a day's work for us to fix. Let us know if you're seriously interested and we can prioritize getting it back up.

It’s not urgent, but when the time comes I will be. Don’t shift priorities on my account though.

This is a cool idea. I feel like you might want to look at Brave and check out their BAT tokens that offer users the ability to donate some of their BAT tokens to creators/publishers.

https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/7cr7yc/new_to_b...

https://comments.network/ (my own) (;

Feel free to reach out and ask anything, but mine was a short test (which worked quite well, but discontinued for other reasons).

You might also want to check Talk: https://coralproject.net/products/talk.html

I find this topic extremely interesting, as I've been searching for a Disqus alternative for a while. Recently I wrote about different comment options on my blog[0] (which I will update after your post, thanks for those links!). I am looking forward to reading the blog post you are planning to do.

[0] - https://darekkay.com/blog/static-site-comments/

I was going to say the same thing. It looks like this project was posted on HN a while ago, too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13700065

Here's another one called Just Comments -- https://just-comments.com/

We'd love to be involved: https://coralproject.github.io/talk/

Talk is part of The Coral Project from Mozilla. It's an open source commenting tool now in use on The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, The Intercept, and many others.

We also conduct research about online communities, as well as publishing strategy guides and trainings. https://coralproject.net/research.html

Code, Heroku install link, and more here: https://github.com/coralproject/talk/

I've run a few large vBulletin forums for years. The biggest problem with internet commenting isn't the software, it's the spam. I wish I had a system that I could train with 10 years of user registration and comment moderation history and have it do the tedious, daily pointy-clicky grind for me.

I setup https://blogspam.net/ to offer an API to do exactly that kind of real-time spam detection for blog/forum comments.

It works. But it is pretty coarse, and doesn't support training. (It used to have a bayasian filter setup, and you could train ham/spam, but I found too many reports of false-positives so this was removed.)

I've seen plugins written for wordpress, drupal ,etc, but it never really took off the way I hoped it might. Still it does mean my own blog is spam-free.

Interesting, a few questions :

* Is it like an open source alternative to Akismet?

* Is it supported by the debian project or is it a personal project?

* What are the specs of the server that hosts this service?

Yes it is like akismet, which is open-source.

It is a personal project, although I did use to run it upon the https://debian-administration.org/ website (which I created and ran as a personal site). I'm not sure why you'd ask about a link to Debian though!

The system was recently rewritten in golang to improve performance, and it will run happily with 1Gb of RAM. It's running on a host that does a lot of other stuff, but basically it is an idle host. The biggest issue is that we store "known-bad" IPs in redis as a cache, so RAM can grow just due to that.

> The biggest issue is that we store "known-bad" IPs in redis as a cache, so RAM can grow just due to that.

How many requests do you serve per month? I see 50 million total rejected comments, but even if you serve a few million requests per month you should be fine with a traditional database like Postgres or MySQL.

I don't keep track of connections to be honest, but I know that I see a fair amount of incoming requests every minute. It goes in waves.

For transient data, which only lasts for a few hours, I'm happy enough with redis - I avoid running database servers for things like this, though I've got a couple of sites that use sqlite as a back-end.

Forcing sign-in to be "log in using email" wiped out +90% of spam for the ~300 forums I run.

I use auth0 now in a passwordless setup, and it requires either Google Auth, Windows (Hotmail) Auth or a one-time-token being emailed to the person (with a 15 minute expiry).

It has required that I pay for Sendgrid to ensure the email delivery... but it's worth it. I deal with virtually no spam nowadays and the biggest cure was this one thing.

When I moderated a mid-sized forum, pretty much 90% of our spam had a URL in the first post, whereas normal users were pretty much the opposite.

It seemed like sending those direct to moderation would have removed a lot of the work. In the end we just moderated all first posts since it wasn't that much volume and I didn't want to modify the software myself.

Is your spam more complex? I've noticed that it seems to be getting fancier.

A moderation queue for everyone's first post is among the best solutions if you can minimize approval time. But you need some impressive manpower for that, like mods willing to get notifications for each first post.

Right now I post registrations and first-posts to a #forum-activity channel on my forum's Discord.

The forum spam problem is easily solved if you ask a question during registration like: "What are the last four letters in the name of this website?" Anything that requires momentary thought from an actual user, and is specific to your website, will throw bots off.

This only mitigates spam if your forum is small enough for spammers to not care. Those questions are a mere extra parameter on the registration post request. Spam software automatically detects those and asks a human to fill it. If the question is static it's even easier than a captcha solver.

Spam is done by massive botnets that crawl the web at a rate nearly equal to Google's.

And they have their equivalents of Amazon's Mechanical TURK to learn how to bypass security questions.

https://2captcha.com/public_statistics <- this for example

You can find humans willing to work for $0.001/captcha.

I've also read that some torrent or other illegal download website display captchas that are in fact captchas from other websites, to crowdsource the captcha bypass.

Correct. There is a long list of human farming options they employ.

They frequently use that one then "pretend" they have workers.

As someone who uses stuff like that to reduce spam, it cuts spam by about ~50%.

Many of them rely on human operator intervention for forum registration when the automated method(s) fail these days.

Have you tried using reCAPTCHA? It even has an "invisible" mode: https://developers.google.com/recaptcha/docs/invisible

I've been searching for a Disqus alternative for a while, and Isso is one of the first project I cape upon. However, I had some problems getting it to run and it did not fully convince me. Recently I wrote a blog post[0] summerizing different options to offer comments on my static site. But in the end I dicided to keep Disqus, but only load the script on a "load comments" button click.

[0] https://darekkay.com/blog/static-site-comments/

Yay! Glad you stayed. We'd be sad to lose you :(

If Disqus built an optional/configurable load-comments-button feature into the product, would you use it?

Great to see a response from Disqus here :)

The big problem most people have with Disqus are privacy and performance issues [0][1]. Of course, a fully free service at this scale often comes at such a price.

Hacking a load-comments-button myself was really easy, but I'm sure many more people would use it if you provided it out of the box.

[0] - https://notes.ayushsharma.in/2017/09/im-killing-disqus-comme...

[1] - http://donw.io/post/github-comments/

> SQLite backend > Because comments are not Big Data.

For small scale applications, I 100% agree. Sqlite3 is so easy to back up and configure.

> If there are many client programs sending SQL to the same database over a network, then use a client/server database engine instead of SQLite.

https://sqlite.org/whentouse.html

Judging from a quick glance, this particular library (Isso) does not seem to be the case of "many client programs sending SQL to the same database over a network". There is only one server as a "client" program, sending SQL directly to the database, not over a network. If so, I'd tend to agree that SQLite is suitable for its purpose.

I've hit r/w concurrency limits on relatively light usage; WAL mode solves it very handily (stops reads and writes from competing, makes only writes compete), but it also means that backup becomes just a little less trivial.

I feel quite the opposite.

I can host a small website for free in places like Heroku. I can use Disqus on S3/Cloudfront, and similar alternatives.

There's a bunch of ways now to easily run a site in a docker container somewhere and connect to a managed DB.

sqlite? That requires me to manage a whole VPS just so I have disk access to it. For my personal site, that's more than I'm willing to get into (also note: managing servers is part of my job description).

I'm just curious, since it wasn't touched upon in the README or the landing page: what's wrong with Disqus? Alternatively: what problem are these Disqus alternatives trying to solve that Disqus doesn't?

As someone who has added Disqus to many projects, I'm genuinely not sure what added value I'd see by using an alternative.

9$ a month to turn off ads. Various other things like (supposedly accidentally) injecting affiliate links (http://www.wpbeginner.com/opinion/switching-away-from-disqus...). Control about your comment data in case they pull yet another one of these things and you want out. Not wanting to expose your users to yet another tracking company.

Hi ryannevius, I list some of the reasons to switch here: https://www.remarkbox.com/finally-a-disqus-alternative.html

Mostly because of privacy and performance issues [0][1]. Additionally, you may not want to force your readers to register to Disqus to leave a comment (you can post as a guest without an account, but this is quite hidden).

[0] - https://notes.ayushsharma.in/2017/09/im-killing-disqus-comme...

[1] - http://donw.io/post/github-comments/

I have never seen better conversation come from Disqus than from originally hosted, or even "let's do this on Twitter?" comments. I have never seen value in such a centralised comment-tracking system.

Somehow it seems like none of these so-called Disqus alternatives cover the use case of people with static websites that don't wan't or can't host the comments themselves.

Yet Another Commenting Server - how many of those do we really need?

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