Static websites are fast and tend to be simple to maintain. But the lack of
processing on the server side means that comments (and other interaction) is a
bit of a hassle.
This is a list - by no means complete - of the systems for doing comments on a
static website.
For each system, I try to give a neutral description. Afterwards, in italics,
I’ve given my very subjective opinions. Those should be taken with a grain of
salt.
In all cases, I will be approaching this from the point of view of a small,
reasonably low volume website such as a personal blog, or the like.
I expect to continue to add to this list as I have time. Please see the
References at the end for other lists.
Hosted with Up to
50,000 page views per month for about 5$/month. Or DIY hosting. No free tier.
But makes promises about privacy. Full OAuth support, so google, etc.
Integrates with Akismet.
Possible to integrate with your own auth system.
Page id can be specified as part of <script> tag.
Free plan allows 100 comments per month (but unlimited views). Page to
comment linkage can be specified in the Javascript. [One of the nicer privacy policy pages. Penalty for going over the
free limit is pretty steep. This is what I am using, currently.]
Probably the best known of the services. Free, but ad-based. Comment
data resides in their servers. User authentication is done. The user can
sign-up using a Google account, A Facebook account, or an email and
password. The user's identity will follow to all sites using Disqus. [Lots of privacy concerns. And the types of ads are also
concerning.]
Stores comments as github issues similar to utterances. However, there
is no back-end. All communication with github takes place from the browser. You
have to initialize each page as it is published. [Utterances wears it better]
Free up to a million page views. Integrates login with social sites.
Has support to do sharing without redirection to the GraphComment servers.
The free tier spam filtering is all manual. [Unconfirmed, but some sources say it injects a Facebook script.]
By Automattic - the company behind Wordpress.Com (not org) and Akismet.
Like Disqus, it is free for use. [Sorry can't take that name seriously. Comments around the seem to
say it hasn't seen any development in last few years. ]
Written in python. Comments stored in
SQLite. You figure out the hosting. Nice docker based install directions. [No authentication at all for commenters. Not necessarily a negative]
Integrates login with social sites or you can provide an auth end point
for them to call. Anonymous posting is possible, but can be disabled.
The page id is settable from the html. [The description of the pricing is a bit disjointed, but for a small
website, it looks like it will run $6/month. Do note that the email feature is
relatively expensive.]
Self-hosted.
Has integration with many major Social Media sites as well as email login
and (configurable) anonymous
posting. Very complete moderating tools. Page id can be set in the page's
javascript. []
Stores comments as text files in your github repository. Has integration
to Akismet and reCaptcha. It can be used for any interaction with the user.
This is just a backend. You get to code the submission form and figure out
how to display the comments. Good
information on configuring with hugo is here. [I don't mind the set up work - it only needs to be done once. But
the actual work binarymist goes through for each post (see comments on the
post) is a bit much. Can it be automated a bit? Also, GitHub
limits]
Hosted option has a low cost (1 Euro/month) plan for
100 new comments per month. [Assuming this is hosted in Europe, is there a GDPR implications for
US citizens?]
Stores the comments as comments against github issues. Each issue will
represent the comments for a particular page. You can control association. The
workflow is done by calling GitHub API in javascript directly from your page. [Does require that the commenter be a GitHub user.]
