A general observation about online comments: when I read an article online and want to know what other people are saying about it, I have no easy & simple way to do so. If your blog has a comments section, that's great, but what about all the other platforms that people discuss things on? (Twitter and Reddit [and of course HN!] come to mind.)<p>I would love to see a comments system that provided insight into commentary occurring across the web. Is there a good reason why online discourse is still fragmented?
So in order to use this, you need to host a new Node app and SQLite database on your server. Also, things like spam control are now back on you.<p>So why not just use a CMS or blog engine which supports traditional server-side comments? I suppose there is a case if you're hosting static HTML pages but still want them to be commentable, but how many people are doing that? I don't get the use case for this.
Another thread on the front page right now is talking about how it's very difficult to get views on your blogs now. And I've felt the same.<p>5-10 years ago I used to get 2-3 digit views on my posts. And I used to use Wordpress / Blogger and the like.<p>Then, when it became fashionable, I spent a lot of time (at least 20-30 hrs, and mind you this was not the geeky kind of work, it was like refactoring code using just grep) converting the blog to one of those static generators, and I suspect that I spent more time migrating all posts than the TOTAL TIME all readers combined have spent on my blog since then.<p>Now I am almost regretting migrating and definitely have no interest whatsoever in spending any more time doing DevOps for the blog.
Setting up a server and installing commenting software, and configuring OpenAuth etc login takes some time.<p>If you want to skip all that, you can use Effective Discussions embedded comments, demo: <a href="https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments" rel="nofollow">https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments</a>. It's open source (<a href="https://github.com/debiki/ed-server" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/debiki/ed-server</a>, I'm developing it), no ads, and has the features Schnack has (notifications via email) and some unique things people here at HN might like:<p><a href="https://www.effectivediscussions.org/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-3-things" rel="nofollow">https://www.effectivediscussions.org/-32/how-hacker-news-can...</a><p>Go to <a href="https://www.effectivediscussions.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.effectivediscussions.org/</a> and click Create Forum and then choose Blog Comments if you want to try it out. (I hope some self promotion is ok.) It's also lightweight, just a 140 kb Javascript bundle.
I understand the sentiment to move away from Disqus.<p>How does this project compare to Mozilla's Coral Project[0]?<p>[0]: <a href="https://coralproject.net/products/talk.html" rel="nofollow">https://coralproject.net/products/talk.html</a>
The point of Disqus is that you don't have to host anything and you can publish an essentially "static" website using any static website generator or just plain HTML pages you make yourself.<p>At this point just build your website around the numerous CMS/Blog options available that have numerous solid comment and spam prevention systems.
A privacy-focused Disqus alternative
<a href="https://github.com/adtac/commento" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/adtac/commento</a>
first off , if you turn off ads on disqus there are no 3rd party requests. maybe that will change with the new owners but it's disingenuous to claim disqus is doing something bad here when there's an option to turn it off.<p>Otherwise the number one reason I stated using disqus is spam. I wrote my own blogging and comment system in 2000. When that got spammed I switched to WordPress around 2008. Even with their anti-spam features I got tons of comment spam. I switched to disqus many years ago and I think I've had no more than 2 spam comments per year since.<p>Disqus benefits from being everywhere in that it can see a bad actor and prevent them from being bad everywhere else. How will this system handle that?
If you are interested in an alternative to Disqus, take a look at Graphcomment, there is a free plan as well, plus we dont resell your data.<p><a href="https://graphcomment.com" rel="nofollow">https://graphcomment.com</a><p>Disclaimer: I work for this company.
I thought the whole advantage of Disqus was that you can keep your static blog static w/o hosting the server machinery for handling comments a la Wordpress?<p>Schnack takes you back to square one? At that point why not throw up a wordpress install?
I find the proposition of moving off Disqus and the performance improvements in shnack very compelling, but worry about managing spam and a server.<p>I haven't looked at the repo yet, but I wonder if it would be possible to make the datastore pluggable so that you could replace SQLite with, say, DynamoDB. It seems like at that point you could potentially keep everything serverless.<p>Barring that, would it be possible to separate out the frontend code and define an API such that a lambda function and serverless backend could be produced for this?
It is an interesting comment on the state of commenting. Gardening the comments section is a lot of work and not something people want to spend their time on (the Blekko blog would get hundreds of spam comment attempts every day!).<p>That makes me wonder if there is also an opportunity for a 'meta comment' section which pulls comments from web sites like HN, Reddit, or Slashdot and puts them below the blog / article that they are related to. You could set an arbitrary vote level cutoff limit.
I make this type of comment a lot, but what's up with naming nowadays?<p>How is Schnack pronounced? How easy do you think it would be to tell somebody to try it out and how high are the chances that they'll misspell it and give up finding the site?<p>I don't get it.
How about integrating a microblogging system like Mastodon in websites so that you don't have to maintain a security sensitive service just for your blog?
I actually like hacknews' comment style the most, neat and simple, good enough for talks, no images and no videos etc too.<p>wish there are some light-weight forum code that is nodejs based, nodebb is a little heavy, and I don't really enjoy discourse's UI.
Why not remove comments entirely? Most people engage on secondary platforms (twitter, facebook) anyway, and most comments are garbage in my experience.<p>Ironically, while trying to post this comment I got ... Bad gateway: The web server reported a bad gateway error.
"lack of control on our own data (the comments, in this case)"<p>That's what worries me about every single website out there. Suddenly they consider users' comments "their own data"