Show HN: Commento: a fast, privacy-focused alternative to Disqus
commento.io
commento.io
So that's what I've been working on for the past year or so. I've received some great feedback from seasoned bloggers who are now using the service and this has helped the the project mature so much over this period. I'm really happy to finally announce the public release of the hosted version (it's been in private beta for a few months now)!
Anyway, AMA!
If there is anything to criticize about the marketing part for me it would be the "privacy focused" bit. Personally I think in 2019 saying you're privacy focused and then only baking that up with a privacy policy is a bit much. You can change it at any time and "continued use of the service" is deemed to have accepted any changes. But even then, AFAIK privacy policies aren't legally binding right?
"Privacy focused" to me means that the business running the service has limited or no access to private information in some way. But that's just me, I am probably a minority.
But you make a good point. I'll think about this to see if there are more concrete ways to offer privacy.
And thanks for the kind words!
Disqus is awful because it spins for 8 seconds before you can see any comments. All that time tracking my users and violating their privacy adds up to a terrible user experience for them.
If they could track my users and violate their privacy during the 100ms it aught to take to load comments from a database, that would be fine.
Everybody tracks and violates these days, so it's all just noise at this point. At least they don't pop up their own thing my users need to click on to accept it all.
The important thing is that comments work. And Disqus can't make that happen.
The one thing I'm most concerned about when putting 3rd party comments on a web site is whether it is easy to comment. Like, do they have to sign up for something? Remember another password? Can they just automatically post if they already have an account elsewhere? (the big advantage of facebook comments)
How does that work at Commento? Do you have any thoughts on allowing sites that already have user accounts to somehow use those directly?
Alternatively, you can choose to post anonymously, if you've enabled that in your website. All it requires is checking a checkbox before posting the comment to reduce friction to engagement.
It looks like an excellent Disqus alternative and goodness knows we need more of those.
I haven't thought about forum slides, but that's pretty interesting too. I don't think Akismet could detect something like that. Of course, you can do it with moderators (you can make it so that all comments must be approved; or you can auto-approve and delete the offtopic ones later), but an automated way to detect that would be cool.
This is the long-term research plan I have; maybe we can even do away with Akismet. Spam is one of the hardest problems to solve, so it'll be interesting. But for now, I'm relying on Akismet until there are fewer and fewer core features left to implement.
Thanks!
Perhaps you could build in a 'self-learning' feature built off the results of akismet such that one day you can provide an alternate spam system altogether.
You could try to filter spam with a simple bayes filter for a start, good idea anyway to have a solution inhouse.
I still want to drop Disqus. But I'd need to get all of my exported comments from Disqus into Commento. Is this possible?
https://twitter.com/slpng_giants/status/1097690326477635584
Perhaps there's a niche there for someone who is a bit more stringent about keeping out the garbage.
I notice that the self hosting options use postgres only. Did you have any plans to expand upon that? (I use mysql mostly).
Keep up the great work!
I am currently making such a site but if Commento offers customization of specific/root comments then I really wouldnt need to do any work.
Right now, there isn't any unique class for root level comments, but it should be trivial to add such a class so that you could style it easily. For example, if I added `.commento-root-comment` to all root comments, you could simply style it with the override in just a few lines.
Might want to hide those since this is supposed to be privacy-focused.
I actually had the provision to omit the email in these requests [1], but I forgot to unset the email before responding.
[1] https://gitlab.com/commento/commento/blob/master/api/comment...
As an aside, I was looking at your source on Gitlab, and if I'm reading your Dockerfile correctly, it's a really nice example of using multi-stage builds to build within Docker but produce a final image that doesn't have the full build system in it. This is something I'd been intending to look into for a personal project, so thanks for saving me a bunch of time. :)
Apparently this habit is now rubbing off on open-source projects, too. :)
That's very cool. I wonder if anyone else does that.
Disclaimer: I work for this company, as you might have already guessed.
I followed the OAuth Plugin issue [0]
I also wanted to create a new issue for SSO, but Gitlab thinks I'm a spammer, so they blocked me from creating one with the cancer that is ReCaptcha.
>OAuth is supported, so you don't need a new account. If you have a Google/Github account, you're good. I'll be adding more providers soon too (Twitter/Gitlab).
I offer a free-forever plan and then monthly or yearly plans for customizing the look and behavior of the comments.
Great for static sites.
If I have commented and then verified my email I want unverified nodes as a todo.
" Welcome to Remarkbox. You have unverified comments. Please check they belong to you and verify them. You will then be notified if somebody replies to them.
[x] I suggest something better / 1 days ago / foo.com/blog/a-good-choice
[x] I am stuck at X / 2 days ago / foo.docs.com/product/intro
[These are my comments, verify them] "
Login state should be represented in a consistent place. If I am not logged in, there is a email field at the bottom. If I am logged in, there is my username at top. A gravatar would have helped.
I would like to discuss this further, could you please reach out to me? https://russell.ballestrini.net/contact/
I do have a custom option for enterprises because their needs are always unique. I usually charge much higher for this (also comes with a much larger pageview count monthly).
Oh that's right - I work for a media company so we want to hoard as much data as possible.
Fullname, email, zipcode, DOB... we ask for all of that if you sign up on our site.
Make or have a bigger/bolder logo and center it vs. making your branding small and to the left.
If so, I'd be interested in finding yet another alternative that does not.
Allowing javascript to run in one's browser is itself a concern for both privacy and security.
Someone could build a commenting system purely based on a CGI model, but then you would have to host the CGI on your server, and forward the comments to a third party service and back.
Why can the comments just be hosted on one's own site and still not require javascript?
I wrote Remarkbox [0] to work without the need for Javascript. Remarkbox does "power up" [1] when Javascript is enabled. This means it works for completely static sites, with or without the _need_ for Javascript.
[0] Remarkbox: https://www.remarkbox.com
[1] Capability driven Presentation: https://russell.ballestrini.net/capability-driven-presentati...
Why does there need to be an iframe? Why couldn't there just be a "click here for comments" link which takes you to a separate page?
"I think that would be more resource intensive and more difficult to cache"
That might be a concern for sites that get lots of traffic, but probably for most blogs it will not be a concern at all, as the comments they will get a are few.
If you want to make something that replaces comment systems such as the one found in WordPress or Disqus, it needs to be embed-able in the site itself. I was imagining how best to make it look like Disqus or Commento, but work without JS. What you could do is in that iframe or whatever is have a "show comments" button and that would then load the comments, but if you only have a "click here for comments" link, why not just send commentators to reddit, HN or another social site?
Because I want full control of the comments, don't want my users to go to another site (because I don't control those sites, nor the comments the user leaves there, and don't want my users or their interest in my site or whatever I post to be tracked by those sites either).