Which static site comment system should I use?

[geerlingguy]

I haven't made a decision yet, but the three front-runners I've found are:

• giscus: Uses GitHub Discussions for comments, and is pretty full-featured... but is not real-time (new comments don't appear on the site until you re-deploy), and users must have a GitHub account to post comments. It also relies on a third party service to host the client.js file / GitHub App (which needs permission for users to comment). So a whole ball of wax. But it's good for moderation (GitHub Discussions tooling is built-in), and doesn't require any additional hosting.
• Meh by @splitbrain: This commenting system is built in PHP and requires a backend with a database + webserver. But it would allow anonymous comments, and can be completely independent/self-hosted.
• Remark42: Self-hosted, seems a little simpler to start up than Meh, and has decent amount of development activity. Seems a little more 'social', with features like image embeds and upvote/downvote, etc. I'd probably turn most of that off.

My main requirements:

• Privacy-focused, self-hosted (otherwise I'd use Disqus if I didn't care about people's privacy, performance, or anything like that)
• Import from Drupal possible (It'll be a custom job, but need to be able to bring across the thousands of old comments)
• Scales to 100+ comments per post (I have a few blog posts with 100+ comments)
• Can't make the frontend slow (if it's JS and loads when you scroll down to the page, that's fine, but don't want the site to be slow because of a 3rd party comment system)
• Threading support (ideally... I'm willing to give on this feature)
• Allows anonymous comments (ideally... I'm willing to give on this feature if other things are way more compelling)
• Spam-prevention features (ideally would like to keep CleanTalk going, as it works pretty well for my moderation needs... but open to other options. Don't want to deal with hundreds of spam comments every day)

[Lorondos]

Remark42 or Isso I was thinking. Remark42 does seem to be more active with releases as well.

I was going to drop Cactus Comments too but that is more my desire to mess about with Matrix. 😅

[DanForever]

Could go old skool phpbb.

I was also going to suggest invision but turns out that's paid and not exactly open source 😅

[slaFFik]

For antispam:
I highly recommend Akismet (https://akismet.com/developers/) as an anti-spam solution. It's really good, and for a non-profit site - it's free. I've been using it for years on all my blogs (via a WordPress plugin, but can easily be integrated directly using their API). But you will need to create your own commenting storage system.

For all-in-one: ReplyBox (https://getreplybox.com/)

[trevortylerlee]

I used Giscus for Astro Micro. It supports reactions which is nice. You can also add JavaScript to reload it so it stays in sync with light/dark mode.

[alectrocute]

Insane idea. Maybe create a Reddit app that creates a new thread in your subreddit upon deploy for all new content and then fetch all user comments client-side via the Reddit API? Would keep all userland discussion in a place where it's already likely happening.

For example, once the thread has been posted, the client can just GET the JSON of the post: https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/1q24hys/trying_to_max_out_m70q_gen_5_connection_to_usb.json

You could write a bash script to automate this on CI.

[DanForever]

Assuming you're serious, the price reddit charges to use it's api would make this prohibitively expensive.

On the other hand, lemmy and/or the fediverse may be a viable alternative.

(or Jeff could just use a self hosted commenting system ;) )

[alectrocute]

the price reddit charges to use it's api would make this prohibitively expensive.

Per reddit:

0.00024 USD per API call

And there's a good chance @geerlingguy's project would apply for the free tier. But let's assume they use the paid tier to be safe and comply fully with TOS.

That's far less than a penny per instance of the bot creating a new post in a subreddit.

And then to fetch the comments for that post, it would be free since the site visitors would call reddit's json endpoint directly via client-side JS.

Assuming you're serious

Deadly serious.

But as a Lemmy contributor, I love that idea!

[alectrocute]

Looks like my dumb decaffeinated brain missed the main requirement:

Privacy-focused, self-hosted

So big disregard on this idea, lol.

[alectrocute]

Just use Giscus and set a GitHub Actions workflow on a cron to do frequent redeployments, even if no changes have taken place. Woohoo!

[greenlogles]

It looks like Remark42 is the closest to what's needed.

[geerlingguy]

I've decided to go with Remark42, it seems to tick off almost all my checkboxes and runs fast enough I don't think I'll end up with any major performance hurdles.

Thank you for all your feedback and ideas!