Now with Comments!
I’m adding a comment widget to some of my posts!
You can see it at the bottom of this post and it might start popping up on posts where I think it makes sense to have comments.
It’s deliberately collapsed by default for two reasons:
- To avoid distracting the reader while they read the article
- To avoid visual clashing - the widget’s styling is an extremely poor fit for the site
The widget is powered by Coral and hosted on my own infrastructure.
In order to comment you have to register. Sadly there seems to be no option to allow anonymous comments, but at least you can delete your account at any time through the account settings.
I also found that the email address you put in doesn’t have to be real - you can comment right after you click register. Not that I recommend using a fake address because you’ll lose the ability to reset your password and receive notifications.
Other than the lack of some options and the dated look, I’m quite happy with Coral.
I found some more options here, but most of them don’t meet my requirements:
- Self-hostable
- Production-ready database - Postgres/MariaDB/etc. NO SQLITE!
- Self-registrations or anonymous comments
- Optional: OIDC login
Most comment systems focused on static sites seem to prioritize ease of deployment and light footprint over resilience and scalability.
So far I like Discourse the most, but it’s is quite heavy and complicated to get going… Not like that has ever stopped me from hosting a service but it’s really overkill to host Discourse just as a comments system for a site.
In the future the comments widget might get replaced by a different one or get removed completely. We’ll see how things go.