Ask HN: Best Self Hosted Comment System? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Best Self Hosted Comment System?

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Because every recommendation I see seems to be a Disqus esque service requiring a third party server, or have some dependence on an external business and their 'network'.

So what's the answer for those who want to host every part of the system themselves, with no reliance on third parties? Cause my site has a 'no third parties' policy, which means I want every single aspect self hosted rather than reliant on a service that can either go out of business, shut down, be sold off or be encouraged to stop serving me because of an angry mob.

I'm currently using WP Disqus, but it costs a fortune because of their business model (charging for every extra feature).

Any recommendations here?

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Build a minimal one in php. Basic JavaScript and php form validation before the php sends an email to a comments@domain account. The email spam filter takes care of the spam. Your moderation tool becomes the email client.

Have a script that runs locally to read the email and automatically insert it into the appropriate page. In my case I insert it into a Jekyll page yaml before recompiling and publishing the comment.

Like https://mylittleforum.net/ ?

What if your server gets blacklisted by your email provider?

Why would you write it in php over django or node?

Any mention of WordPress and I automatically think php. It’s pervasive and simple enough to setup. To validate a form and send an email you can use whatever is there — whatever is quickest and easiest for you.

If there is a demand for this, I will happily build it! I've been looking for a new FOSS project to start.

Please either upvote or comment to let me know :)

Yes! If it’s something that I can host as cloud functions or something that would be even cooler :) I’d contribute.

Using Cloud Functions would be interesting. But how would you handle persistence?

Haven't looked, but I distinctly remember AWS Lambda +Dynamo DB based solution long back on a Show HN. I'm on mobile now, but will find and post a link later

AWS is third party.

Found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11644042

how will you handle spam?

Not sure, I've never had to handle spam before. Something to learn! Rate limiting is the easiest solution. I could have an IP blacklist also.

It'd all be manageable by whoever is hosting.

My solution was is here - https://github.com/skx/e-comments

There are others, such as https://github.com/posativ/isso/ out there too. There doesn't seem to be a single "standard" solution, because most people just don't care. They use Wordpress, or similar, with integrated comment-support, or they use disuqis.

Talkyard looks like Disqus, is open source self hosted. Plus serverless hosting no ads no tracking:

Demo: https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments/

More info: https://www.talkyard.io/blog-comments

There're Discourse + Hacker News discussion forum features too, if later on you want to start a forum / community around your blog. Email notifications. Sign in with Gmail / Facebook / GitHub / email+password. I'm developing Talkyard.

Found this just yesterday, and really really like the concept.

Would be cool if it supported logins via Keycloak, as that's what I use. Will keep watching, it seems there's some work on Oauth/SSO going on.

Can I ask what do you use Keycloak for — is it for you blog only? Or for other things too? — Keycloak is a separate server with its own user database, right? To me that sounds a bit heavyweight to have login on a separate server, for a blog? So that's why I'm curious about if you use Keycloak for other things too :- )

B.t.w. I'm thinking about starting to use pac4j, which apparently supports Keycloak: https://github.com/pac4j/pac4j/blob/master/pac4j-oidc/src/ma...

It looks like the comments aren’t showing up properly when I’m on Safari on iOS in the blog post :P

http://imgur.com/kFPTMaC

That might be iOS tracker blocker. Sometimes iOS incorrectly thinks the embedded comments iframe is a tracker, although any cookies are on a per blog unique subdomain only (meaning, cannot do any tracking). I need to look into this ... and also I just got a separate domain, for the CDN things, that might make iOS less unhappy.

Thanks for reminding / telling me about this.

I've started fixing this now ... by removing cookies completely (unless one logs in to post/edit a comment; then there's a session cookie).

+ adding a cookieless just-type-name-and-email Guest login. (Session id remembered only for the current page load; everything forgotten on page refresh. This should make it impossible for iOS etc to classify this as a tracker.)

https://posativ.org/isso/

https://github.com/posativ/isso

I’ve never tried self hosting it but commento (https://gitlab.com/commento/commento-ce) might work for you.

Heyo, thanks a lot for the shout-out. Original author here, happy to answer any questions you guys might have. Here's a demo of what Commento looks like: https://demo.commento.io

I should mention that there's also an enterprise edition that adds proprietary, enterprise-y features like audit logs, SSO, etc. that you can purchase for a one-time fee [1]. It also supports the project :)

But worry not, the community edition will always be fully functional and I'll never make it crippleware.

[1] https://commento.io/pricing

I host Commento for a couple sites, and it's awesome. It's really easy to manage and it kind of just works. My only gripe with it is the lack of email notifications for followup comments, but that's certainly not a deal breaker for small sites like mine.

Shouldn't Hacker news be open source, since monetization is not their primary intent ? That could be a nice comment system.

Edit: since Hacker news uses firebase, it would be nice to have some statistics for Their firebase usage and costing etc, if available anywhere ?

The software Hacker News is based upon is open source[0], however Hacker News itself is not, because the site is run by a venture capital firm and monetization is the primary intent of many users who are YC's potential clients.

[0]http://arclanguage.org/

I wouldn't mind seeing an ActivityPub-based (http://activitypub.rocks) comment system. It would enable a decent self-hosted, experience that works with other AP-based platforms. The landscape for such a thing should be forthcoming given the popularity of Mastodon, PeerTube, and others supporting the protocol. Doesn't seem overly hard to implement for a comment system.

Not affiliated in any way, haven't actually used it and I see no development happening lately, so caveat emptor, but https://github.com/s-gv/orangeforum might be worth a look, it is written in Go and it does look decent.

On a related note, say I want to build my own commenting system (self hosted), any good papers / articles / discussion topics to share?

Topics from db structure to how to handle nesting(display wise), sorting (top / trending), etc. Some gotchas which we might miss.

Lobsters[0] put their code up, might need some massaging, but maybe you could use it for inspiration.

[0] https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters

we use staticman for a static / jekyll site, it adds comments via forms and github pull requests. works well if you're not exactly drowning in comments and if only minimal moderation is required.

some recent blog articles describe similar systems, e.g. https://www.bhnywl.com/blog/comments-for-your-static-blog-wi...

Are we talking about comments on things like blog posts? I guess it depends on the features you want. Do you want:

* Moderated by yourself or other?

* Nested comments?

* Register before commenting?

What would be your feature wish list?

Check Talk https://coralproject.net/talk/ .

HelloBox is another alternative

https://www.hellobox.co

Look at https://remark42.com/

nice but I wouldn't want to use sso

Use NNTP perhaps

Discourse (https://www.discourse.org/) would be my bet.

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