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Moving from Disqus to Schnack

blog.webkid.io

21–30 of 120 posts

Re: Moving from Disqus to Schnack

#21

I make this type of comment a lot, but what's up with naming nowadays? How is Schnack pronounced? How easy do you think it would be to tell somebody to try it out and how high are the chances that they'll misspell it and give up finding the site? I don't get it.

Agreed. Isn't the old rule, if you have to spell it in a loud public space (rather than just saying it), then it's a bad name?

Re: Moving from Disqus to Schnack

#22

I make this type of comment a lot, but what's up with naming nowadays? How is Schnack pronounced? How easy do you think it would be to tell somebody to try it out and how high are the chances that they'll misspell it and give up finding the site? I don't get it.

It's German for 'chat'.

Here is the translation including audio: https://dict.leo.org/englisch-deutsch/schnack

Re: Moving from Disqus to Schnack

#23

I make this type of comment a lot, but what's up with naming nowadays? How is Schnack pronounced? How easy do you think it would be to tell somebody to try it out and how high are the chances that they'll misspell it and give up finding the site? I don't get it.

I assume it’s like snack, but with an initial sh sound.

And I don’t think software projects with inscrutable names are a new thing. I still have no idea how to pronounce “PostgreSQL”, for instance.

Re: Moving from Disqus to Schnack

#24

I make this type of comment a lot, but what's up with naming nowadays? How is Schnack pronounced? How easy do you think it would be to tell somebody to try it out and how high are the chances that they'll misspell it and give up finding the site? I don't get it.

I assume it’s like snack, but with an initial sh sound. And I don’t think software projects with inscrutable names are a new thing. I still have no idea how to pronounce “PostgreSQL”, for instance.

I have always said Post-gres-Q-L which is probably wrong but it's too late to change now. I'm committed.

Re: Moving from Disqus to Schnack

#25
I find the proposition of moving off Disqus and the performance improvements in shnack very compelling, but worry about managing spam and a server.

I haven't looked at the repo yet, but I wonder if it would be possible to make the datastore pluggable so that you could replace SQLite with, say, DynamoDB. It seems like at that point you could potentially keep everything serverless.

Barring that, would it be possible to separate out the frontend code and define an API such that a lambda function and serverless backend could be produced for this?

Re: Moving from Disqus to Schnack

#27
Another thread on the front page right now is talking about how it's very difficult to get views on your blogs now. And I've felt the same.

5-10 years ago I used to get 2-3 digit views on my posts. And I used to use Wordpress / Blogger and the like.

Then, when it became fashionable, I spent a lot of time (at least 20-30 hrs, and mind you this was not the geeky kind of work, it was like refactoring code using just grep) converting the blog to one of those static generators, and I suspect that I spent more time migrating all posts than the TOTAL TIME all readers combined have spent on my blog since then.

Now I am almost regretting migrating and definitely have no interest whatsoever in spending any more time doing DevOps for the blog.

Re: Moving from Disqus to Schnack

#28

I understand the sentiment to move away from Disqus. How does this project compare to Mozilla's Coral Project[0]? [0]: https://coralproject.net/products/talk.html

Developer with The Coral Project here. Schnack seems to provide a simple solution to the "let us put some comments on the site" in a very simple and pleasantly small package. (Like seriously small, we're jealous of those numbers :)) Talk on the other hand provides a full admin panel for moderators, a robust plugin system for configuring every part of the experience. Admittedly, not every small blog is going to need a…

> supporting millions of users and tens of millions of comments

That seems like an unusually low number of comments per user, best case 99:1.

Re: Moving from Disqus to Schnack

#29
post #2

So in order to use this, you need to host a new Node app and SQLite database on your server. Also, things like spam control are now back on you. So why not just use a CMS or blog engine which supports traditional server-side comments? I suppose there is a case if you're hosting static HTML pages but still want them to be commentable, but how many people are doing that? I don't get the use case for this.

I feel the same. I wonder if a free heroku account and a docker image of the setup would work if you really wanted this? Seems like full on DevOps is not necessary for a very self-contained simple commenting app like this if you wanted to self host with minimal cost/effort.

Re: Moving from Disqus to Schnack

#30
post #26

If you are interested in an alternative to Disqus, take a look at Graphcomment, there is a free plan as well, plus we dont resell your data. https://graphcomment.com Disclaimer: I work for this company.

Free advice -- worth what you paid for it: for sites who don't get many comments, it doesn't matter what they use. For those that get lots of comments, the two most important things are building a community and moderating it. To a large extent, community depends on history presented cogently. To that end, showing a user where they are in a thread and what they haven't yet read is paramount.

Build distinctly better moderation tools, and the experience will be enjoyable, too.

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