Website Comments
Last updated: January 18, 2021
Disqus is probably the most common drop-in commenting platform for websites, but there are some privacy concerns. I’m keeping a non-exhaustive list of alternatives:
- JustComments
- Talk - The Coral Project
- IntenseDebate
- Libbum/oration: A Rocket/Elm self hosted commenting system for static sites
- Staticman (can add any dynamic content to static sites, including, in theory, comments)
Some of the links above are for hosted services. The problem with these is if they shut down, there may not be a good path for getting comments out and into another similar service. For example, a company called Livefyre was once a promising Disqus competitor, but it was purchased by Adobe and eventually shut down.
Other links are for open source software you can run yourself. The problems this are are keeping on top of software updates, maintaining the security of the server running the comment service, and figuring out what to do if the software becomes no longer maintained.