TL;DR: I won't expose any of my projects or API directly these days due to spam, ddos and other abuse.
This is unfortunate, because they're amazing feedback if you write about bureaucracy. People won't take the time to write to you about their experience, but they'll leave a comment.
Have you considered an info box where the comments would be to push anyone interested to mail? Or allow comments but make them work more like mail with comments not being publicly visible until you approve them?
If you just want to cut down on non-targeted spam then it might be enough to have your comments work even slightly differently from the standard word-press solution, e.g. by adding a simple text field with a question that real human visitors of your site should be able to answer. This alone has worked for all of my sites that allow user contributions so far - won't stop anyone trying to spam your site specifically ofc but you can always take further measures WHEN that becomes a problem.
PS: Is your site supposed to have a default WordPress favicon?
Not a bad idea, thanks. Maybe I'll try that. I suspect the "problem" is I just have approx. zero readers :)
> If you just want to cut down on non-targeted spam then it might be enough to have your comments work even slightly differently from the standard word-press solution, e.g. by adding a simple text field with a question that real human visitors of your site should be able to answer.
Yeah, I'd like to do that, but I don't have the time/interest in figuring out how to make Wordpress do that. I tried googling for plugins or whatever a while back, but never found anything pre-made.
> Is your site supposed to have a default WordPress favicon?
Never thought of changing it!
Im thinking of using GitHub issues/discussions as a comment system. The website and everything will function normally without CloudFlare, but the comments are based on GitHub, which will deal with spam and hosting for me.
And i personally think using it is better from centralizing the internet view, as you don't increase the absolutely crazy 20% that CF controls of the web.
But that obviously doesn't solve the DDOS problem, which should be solved with big cloud providers which have included DDOS protection.
Another workaround is using IPFS, but for a normal user, he/she will need a gateway, and guess who operates on of the biggest IPFS gateways ?, Yes CF. That without considering the tradeoffs is using IPFS.
I think a static site + external comment provider like Github, might help with the attacks and spam without using Cloudflare, but I don't have any website close to your blogs size, so its all just a predication.
I do generally think federated social networking (ActivityPub) is a good way to handle commenting. Comments are associated with identities separate from your site and there's plenty of opportunity to layer a reputation system on top of that, though I don't know if it's been done yet.