Ask HN: What comment-system do you recommend for a static blog? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What comment-system do you recommend for a static blog?

13 pointsgitgud14 comments

Currently I'm using Disqus, but it's now adding 10 huge clickbait thumbnails on every page. And $11/month doesn't seem worth the cost to remove them...

I'm interested in other alternatives, hopefully easy to integrate like Disqus was. Also interested if comments can be migrated too.

View on HN

One thing to consider is, do you need comments at all?

Some people use twitter as the commenting system. You assign each post a unique hashtag. People comment on the post by incorporating the hashtag in their tweets. On the post page, i think there is a way to show tweets using that unique hashtag

My current blog is a primary home for my LinkedIn post content. Four or five posts a week. I don't allow comments on the blog, but I link from the bottom of the blog to the LinkedIn post page.

I do it this way because my target audience is almost all on LinkedIn, and it allows me to keep any discussion (however little there is) in one place.

https://benigninteroperability.com/

I just invite people to email me. It dramatically reduces how nuch effort I put into moderation. People do write, and the emails are far more thoughtful and personal.

Do you publish any of them? (In the spot where comments usually go: under the post)

I use questions from readers to improve the content itself.

Emails let me give more information to fewer people. Private conversations allow me to give clearer information without risk. Some could construe my answers as legal advice, and it could get me in trouble as it did for a friend in the industry.

Above all, it reduces the number of comments, which allows me to focus on my work. There is not enough time in the day to moderate and respond to comments from so many readers.

Here is a popular blog that uses Discourse for comments: https://blog.codinghorror.com/welcome-to-the-internet-of-com...

HOWTO: https://meta.discourse.org/t/embed-discourse-comments-on-ano...

Many years ago I tried using Facebook: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/comments/

Some people open a GitHub issue per post and then use the GitHub API to pull in the comments and regenerate the static page.

Not too difficult to do with Vercel, Cloudflare etc.

Personally I'm comments off. Some people tweet compliments. Nobody tweets anything mean.

The other day I was thinking about adding comments to my markdown based microblog hosted on prose.sh as well. I don't want to maintain any technical infrastructure, at most it would have some sort of spam detection out of the box and easy content moderation. Having it embedded in my blog is not a must.

So I thought about adding a link on each blog post to a unique reddit post on my own subreddit. Most people have reddit.

One downside is that you have to have two windows open if you want to comment while copying snippets from the post.

Another option was Web annotation, but the standard and the infrastructure needed to make it work look massively complicated.

I guess I will try https://giscus.app/

I'm currently building a static blog for myself. For my own blog, I will probably link it to my mastodon for commenting.

Shared this in another thread last week, but here's a good overview of comment systems for static sites (not mine): https://darekkay.com/blog/static-site-comments/

You can build it using Netlify forms or cloud flare functions. But I rarely get comments that are not spam. Think if you need them. Email/twitter or GitHub issues might be good enough.

Post your articles on Hacker News (assuming it's relevant content)

Remark42

I found this one works best for me as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com