Ask HN: Best Self Hosted Comment System?

Because every recommendation I see seems to be a Disqus esque service requiring a third party server, or have some dependence on an external business and their 'network'.

So what's the answer for those who want to host every part of the system themselves, with no reliance on third parties? Cause my site has a 'no third parties' policy, which means I want every single aspect self hosted rather than reliant on a service that can either go out of business, shut down, be sold off or be encouraged to stop serving me because of an angry mob.

I'm currently using WP Disqus, but it costs a fortune because of their business model (charging for every extra feature).

Any recommendations here?

Are we talking about comments on things like blog posts? I guess it depends on the features you want. Do you want:

* Moderated by yourself or other?

* Nested comments?

* Register before commenting?

What would be your feature wish list?

Build a minimal one in php. Basic JavaScript and php form validation before the php sends an email to a comments@domain account. The email spam filter takes care of the spam. Your moderation tool becomes the email client.

Have a script that runs locally to read the email and automatically insert it into the appropriate page. In my case I insert it into a Jekyll page yaml before recompiling and publishing the comment.

Discourse (https://www.discourse.org/) would be my bet.

Shouldn't Hacker news be open source, since monetization is not their primary intent ? That could be a nice comment system.

Edit: since Hacker news uses firebase, it would be nice to have some statistics for Their firebase usage and costing etc, if available anywhere ?