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Comment by adtac | Hacker News Reader

Hiya, creator here. My original post from April 2017 [1] when I released Commento as a self-hosted software received fantastic feedback, but the single most requested feature was a hosted service because it's not always convenient to maintain a server. Plus, it'll never be a proper alternative to Disqus unless there's a hosted version.

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!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14202456

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Product looks fantastic, well done. Always refreshing to see services actively attempt to keep payloads small.

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.

Honestly, I always thought being privacy focused is simply not succumbing to third-party trackers, ads, and other shady stuff. Really, the barrier for entry to qualify as privacy-focused in the comments space is extremely low.

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!

"Privacy" isn't the real issue for me. The reason I don't want all that tracking to happen with my comments plugin is speed.

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.

This is cool. Congrats on getting it out there.

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?

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).

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.

Cool, thanks.

Wow. This looks great. I loved Disqus when it first arrived as it gave static sites a way of having comments. Your product neatly fits the bill of giving us the ownership of the comments back.

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!

Right now, the code is tightly coupled with Postgres and it uses some Postgres-specific SQL stuff. But that said, I'll think about some kind of database abstraction layer and maybe even support SQLite. No promises right away though, haha.

Agreed – looks like a fantastic product! Seconding the question about MySQL support. I use MySQL for everything. I don't want to add extra gigs of RAM to my VPS just to run an instance of PostgreSQL for Commento. Postgres is much slower than MySQL in simple applications and uses a lot more memory per connection. MySQL is also more popular and more people know how to use it and tune it properly. Postgres is probably more stable, but I don't care about that in a commenting app.

Posting something like `<script type="text/javascript">alert('hello')</script>` creates a blank comment instead of safely HTML encoding the text.

Do you use text processing to identify spammers or can it spot things like forum slides (inflammatory comments designed to trigger a reply cascade and push other content aside)? Any API for researchers?

It looks like an excellent Disqus alternative and goodness knows we need more of those.

Right now, I'm relying on Akismet [1] to automatically filter spam, which is a really good service. It's built by Automattic and they've had years of spam data to work with.

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!

[1] https://akismet.com/

On my blog I ask a random question that any of my readers would know the answer to. This makes sure they actually read what they are commenting and I received zero Spam so far..

I switched to disqus years ago because Akismet was failing to identify spam on my wordpress site. So far with disqus I get maybe 2 a year

Be aware that Akismet is a problematic service to use in the EU, because you might be sending private data over to that company. Akismet can be used without that metadata, maybe you do that already, just something to look out for

You could try to filter spam with a simple bayes filter for a start, good idea anyway to have a solution inhouse.

Personally, I'd prefer to not be using akismet.

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.

This looks great, and the landing page does a fantastic job of summarizing the features and benefits. I know some of the web comic creators I follow are kind of dissatisfied with the current direction of Disqus, so I'll probably recommend this to them if and when it comes up.

Hi Adhityaa, in your Terms of Service (https://commento.io/terms), you reference your company as " Commento, Inc". What US state (or jurisdiction) is it incorporated in?

Commento, Inc. is incorporated in the state of Delaware, USA (file #6797473).

Is it possible to style/customize the root comment, so that I essentially get a parent post and then all child comments?

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.

You can override the styling with your own CSS. See https://docs.commento.io/configuration/frontend/

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.

Nice, looks polished. I remember it from 2017.

I still want to drop Disqus. But I'd need to get all of my exported comments from Disqus into Commento. Is this possible?

Yep. So you'll need to start an export of your comments on Disqus. They'll send you a link to an archive. Paste that link in the dashboard and all comments will be downloaded and imported (preserving formatting, reply structure, etc.). More info in the dashboard.

From this page, it looks like importing comments from Disqus is supported: https://commento.io/pricing

Here's an angle you might consider pursuing. Disqus basically doesn't follow their terms of service:

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.

It's not even just that lol, Disqus is still "working towards GDPR compliance" according to their privacy policy [1], almost a full year after GDPR came into effect.

[1] http://archive.is/is90r

having a terms of service doesn't magically give you super powers for policing content

People continue to report sites like that for the hate speech, racism and so on, and Disqus doesn't do anything. They could easily drop the entire site.

Their customer is the site, not the commentators (or people reporting negative comments)? So dropping an entire site due to a lot of complaints would just hurt their revenue. Also it wouldn't necessarily be fair to the site if there's a lot of trolls and racists etc in the comments through no fault of the site.

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