comments in the blog

[StephanJanosch]

I looked up discuss alternatives. There are a few.

We would need a docker-instance for running our own comment service.

[nuest]

Have you taken a look at Staticman?

https://staticman.net/

[StephanJanosch]

Nope. I don't understand their business model. All comments are routed through their system.

They claim, they don't track or sell data. Yet....

[VincentTam]

Hi, this is the maintainer of @staticmanlab, a public GitLab instance of Staicman. Here's some shortcomings of common third-party commenting systems.

1. Gitment, Gitalk and Utterance support only GitHub, and they require user login before commenting. This can scare away many non programmers from leaving a comment to your posts. Besides, comments are part of the site's static content, not a software package problem. As a result, using GtiHub issues for comment storage is wrong in principle and bad in terms of SEO.
2. Commento is not free as in free beer. For a personal blog with small traffic, you might find a monthly fee of $5 too expensive.
3. Disqus and Isso contain a 3rd-party script to be loaded during page rendering. The code block for loading each of them shows that the static comments are not rendered as static HTML code. This hinders search engines from grabbing the comments, which are part of the site's content. As a result, that leads to suboptimal SEO.

To see more reasons for migrating from Disqus, you may view

1. https://victorzhou.com/blog/replacing-disqus/
2. https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/b9022a/switching_off_of_disqus_reduced_my_page_weight_by/
3. https://medium.com/remys-blog/ejecting-disqus-4120e9985823

You may avoid these problems by switching to Staticman, which makes use of GitHub/GitLab Pull/Merge Requests instead of issues. Under Staticman's model, static comments are YML/JSON files stored in the remote GitHub/GitLab repo (usually under data/comments, configurable through the path parameter in root-level staticman.yml), and through a static blog generator (Jekyll/Hugo/etc), the stored data are rendered as part of the content. This gives a total ownership of a static site's comments.

A tutorial for configuring Staticman with GitHub/GitLab repo:
https://www.datascienceblog.net/post/other/staticman_comments/

Flexibility is one of the Staticman's greatest advantages. It seems strange to qualify something static and flexible, but Staticman makes it! Here's some sample Staticman UI's:

1. adding scores ⭐ to HTML forms
2. enable Markdown preview 👁️
3. nested comments
4. math 🔢 in comments

[VincentTam]

Nope. I don't understand their business model. All comments are routed through their system.

They claim, they don't track or sell data. Yet....

The source code of Staticman is open, so you may check the source code to verify that the Node.js app itself doesn't store anything. You might consider self-hosting for 100% control over the commenting system.

[StephanJanosch]

Thanks for stopping by @VincentTam! Your explanations are very useful! Great service!