I'm building a MEAN-stack reddit/HN clone as a fun side project and toy. Although its value is primarily its educational benefit for me, I'd like to build it out and go through all the steps of a proper deployment to learn more about production and get experience with stuff like analytics, ads, etc.<p>I'm adding authentication right now and, facing the O-Auth question, wondering if I should go with delegated comments via Facebook or Disqus, or stick with my native system.<p>Since this is a side project (I'm a writer in a tech-ish field) I don't have much time for moderation. My biggest fear is that, left (relatively) untended, my small community site will be overrun by spambots and trolls.<p>A delegated system doesn't completely forestall this, but it does offer its own spam tools and (in the case of FB especially) a persistent user identity that might discourage trolling. On the other hand, I could do more with a native system, and if it turned out to be possible, I'd love to add my own simple spam/hatespeech detection as another learning exercise.<p>Does anyone have experience with a similar side project? Or are there any moderators who might have insight into the system?
Worrying about spambots and trolls is basically a premature optimization. You call this a niche site but some how it is going to be popular enough spambots and trolls will want to come. If it is truly a niche site then popularity will by definition be limited. So which is it, niche or hugely popular?<p>Even if it is a non-niche site, your assuming it will be popular with trolls/spambots. So as you can see your worrying about a problem you may never have. However, you are wise to think about it and be ready.<p>Since you said you want this to be a learning experience, go ahead and write your own commenting system. It will teach you a lot. Put up some small barriers to prevent spam. Captcha, email verification, SMS verification, etc. These are all pretty easy to do and there are services that will help you out.<p>Lastly, if it does become a troll hole then be prepared to migrate your data. I would say put off writing any migration scripts, but maybe look at the comment services and see how you can import comments. I've done this before on Disqus and it is not too hard.
Don't worry about spam bots. One of my websites has more than 2500 visitors daily and I am still waiting for the first spam comment.
Spammers don't search pages by hand. Their programs look for "footprints" of the usual software (ie Wordpress) and try to automatically add comments. If you build your own commenting system from scratch and use the good practice for building (preventing XSS..), you are ok.<p>Or put it this way, if your website becomes so popular, that spammers will customize their programs to try to automatically post on your page, you have bigger problems :)
IMHO, I believe you need to align your expectations about value you wanna extract from the comment section.<p>Do you want spread the content or you want to enrich the content? It's very important to know.<p>I can see you already accepted the challenge to build the thing from nothing. What worries you seems the hard and must-do decision, because if you chose a delegated system you will have a big problems to migrate the content generated through the comments.<p>If you want just spread the content, go with the delegated systems, FB for e.g.<p>If you want to create value, build your system, it will give you space to explore possibilities that underlies out of your sight.
I would make your own one. Worst case is you learn from making it, then switch over to another commenting system.<p>I think that making one will also give you more of an insight into how the delegated ones work - that can't be a bad thing!