Juvia: Free software Disqus comment server | Hacker News Reader

Juvia: Free software Disqus comment server

github.com

131 pointscomice26 comments

It's nice to see a self-hostable alternative to Disqus. It's not likely to make me stop using Disqus, because I like the convenience of not having to deal with the hosting myself, but it makes me feel more comfortable knowing that if Disqus ever became evil I could move away.

I wrote it mainly because I found Disqus and IntenseDebate too limiting, not because of concerns about hosting or data ownership. I'm trying to implement per-section commenting for the Phusion Passenger manual similar to how it's done in the Django book (http://www.djangobook.com/). However after a week of trying it became painfully clear that Disqus was only designed for one use case in mind: a single comment box per page, e.g. blogs. Comment topics in Disqus are tied to the URL, which doesn't work in my case because I want each section on the same page to have a different comment topic. The Disqus developer documentation says that they support AJAX but I did things exactly as documented and all I got was vague undebuggable JavaScript errors.

IntenseDebate was the almost exactly same. I gave up after two days.

I finished the most important parts of Juvia today. I got Juvia commenting in the manual working in about 15 minutes.

Have you made a final decision on no-nested comments/replying? There are some comments related to adding nesting as a feature, as you can even see with your own comment reply here- it's useful and pretty much a necessity these days to make sense of conversation.

No it's not a final decision, but I'm not going to write support for it so feel free to contribute. That said I did add a 'Reply to comment' button a few minutes ago by popular demand.

I agree with loceng. Nested comments are really valuable with any sort of active conversation. If you are only thinking of 2 people in a conversation as your test case, then it's fine as it is.

Btw, really good work with Juvia so far. Been going through your github source and might even play with it next weekend.

Did you successfully use this for per-section commenting somewhere? Can that be viewed? I've been looking for a good way to do this for a long time.

Yes. Still working on it though: https://github.com/FooBarWidget/mizuho It's not finished yet. The Juvia site key and URL are currently hardcoded in the source.

I do seem to recall there being some way to override the thread identifier for Disqus, though I'll admit that I never bothered to try it.

The thread identifier is not the problem. I'm only displaying one comment topic at a time by using a lightbox. However once I have loaded a Disqus comment topic, switching to another one seems to fail randomly even if I call their documented DISQUS.reset API.

Perhaps you could give each section/paragraph it's own URL and link the 'per-page/resource' comments to that?

The sections are really short. Giving each section its own URL will make the reading experience horrible. Most of my users told me that they actually prefer a one-page manual because it makes searching easier.

Juvia currently also makes no effort to support nested comments. I believe nested comments only make sense for extremely active discussion forums.

Quite the contrary, high traffic sites like facebook have single thread comments where everyone keeps repeating the same things. Threaded comments are necessary for discussions.

If people keep repeating the same thing then that would qualify as an active discussion. Juvia is specifically not designed for active discussion. It's just for simple commenting.

For what it's worth, I've got my own Disqus alternative: https://github.com/alexandru/TheBuzzEngine

You can see it in action here: http://thebuzzengine.appspot.com/

However, on my blog I have switched back to Disqus. Mostly because the only thing bothering me about Disqus is its bloatness which makes the page take a performance hit, but other than that it works great and you can export your comments at any time.

I think the primary reason I use Disqus instead of coding my own comment server is for its community.

When you have Disqus powering your comments, you have two ways of contributing to this community: by commenting on other people's thoughts (be they blog entries, photos, or news articles) or by writing your own entry and having people comment. You're basically getting a free identity system without the complexity of OpenId or the control of Facebook. I like that balance.

I'm not sure this software can give me that, but I'll be happy if it does.

Is Juvia compatible with Gray? (Judging by the comments so far, few people will get it, but with that logo, this comment is required)

Finally! I was waiting for someone to recognize the name. :D

I just added a 'Reply to this comment' button because so many people asked for it.

The test page http://juvia-demo.phusion.nl/admin/sites/1/test is giving a 404

That's because someone deleted the site object. The demo database is reset every 24 hours and I've just issued a manual reset.

I really like disqus and I don't want to have to invest in rails. Wish the OP the best of luck though :)

where's browserid support ;-)

Lack of nested comments is a shame, I believe it's vital for anything more than Engadget/Youtube style comments.

Misleading title as this is not a "Disqus comment server", but a comment server unrelated to Disqus written in RoR.

The submitter probably just meant "Disqus-like commenting server".

It's just funny because Disqus is criticized right away within the readme on github.

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