Comment by ploggingdev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ploggingdev | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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/

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