Only show Giscus comments in blog posts

[benlindsay]

I'm switching from Disqus to Giscus, and Giscus looks great, but I only want a Giscus comments section on blog posts, not on the blog post listing page or my About Me page. Is there a way to configure that without CSS hackers? Something like posts-only: true in the Giscus section of _quarto.yml or comments: false that can be added on a page by page basis?

[dragonstyle]

The simplest way is with a metadata file like this in your posts directory:

https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-web/tree/main/docs/blog/posts

which you can use to enable it for all the posts. You should also be able to set comments: false on a given page to disable comments specifically for that page.

HTH!

[benlindsay]

Oh cool! Didn't realize comments: false was an option or putting the giscus metadata in a subdirectory. Is there documentation to explain that that I missed?

[dragonstyle]

There isn't a single place that really shows the end to end process for this...

Commenting is a part of our HTML format, meaning that it can be specified per page (https://quarto.org/docs/output-formats/html-basics.html#commenting). This, in turn, means that you really can control it at the project level, at the _metadata level, or at the page level. It's not shown end to end in a single place, we're currently sort of relying on the principle explained above which I realize is a bit abstract. To get this out of our docs, you'd really have to read about and understand the way metadata works in Quarto (best example of that is here: https://quarto.org/docs/projects/quarto-projects.html#shared-metadata) and then note that comments is a format level option. Disabling is covered in the commenting docs, too.

Quarto is big enough that documentation is definitely a challenge and we're continuing to try to improve that!

[benlindsay]

Got it, thanks! Not sure how I missed the comments info on the HTML Basics page 😅