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Moving from Disqus to Schnack

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Re: Moving from Disqus to Schnack

#101

Post by robbrown451 »

codinghorror wrote: post #87
ehnto wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discourse is fragmented because there are dozens of different communities that like to talk amongst themselves. I think that's fine. I don't always want to be talking on an internet megaphone and I definitely don't want to be listening to one all the time.

Yes, fragmentation is a feature. Otherwise you are re-inventing Facebook, and we aren’t even sure we want the one of those we have.

If the only idea you have for non-fragmented is Facebook, ok, but I can imagine many other things that are useful, far better than Facebook and nothing like it.

Re: Moving from Disqus to Schnack

#102

Post by stevekemp »

hckr1292 wrote: post #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…

For what it is worth my own "toy" project for self-hosted dynamic comments does exactly that.

I support Redis and SQLite for hosting comments, and it should be possible for another user to contribute support for different backing-stores.

Plugins are supported for spam-detection, which lets me use the https://blogspam.net service (which I host) for doing real-time blog/forum spam detection.

My project is here:

https://github.com/skx/e-comments/

Re: Moving from Disqus to Schnack

#103

Post by KajMagnus »

ausjke wrote: post #76

I actually like hacknews' comment style the most, neat and simple, good enough for talks, no images and no videos etc too. wish there are some light-weight forum code that is nodejs based, nodebb is a little heavy, and I don't really enjoy discourse's UI.

Maybe you'd like EffectiveDiscussions — it's light weight, client side, 140 kb js (but not server side). It's inspired by Hacker News and Reddit, as you can see on this demo page: https://insightful.demo.ed.community/-11/my-son-was-sent-hom...

+ improvements about two things here at HN that make me annoyed :-P https://www.effectivediscussions.org/-32/how-hacker-news-can...

Re: Moving from Disqus to Schnack

#104

Post by _0w8t »

Cyberdog wrote: 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.

It is trivial to make a static blog CDN-friendly, not so much CRM like Wordpress. It is doable, but the amount of efforts is non-trivial.

In addition it improves the site security. An XSS bug in commenting code in Wordpress can allow the attacker to become the administrator for the whole site. A similar bug in commenting engine only allows the attacker to damage the comments and temporary disfigure the site with straightforward recovery.

Re: Moving from Disqus to Schnack

#105

Post by KajMagnus »

beachy wrote: post #82
ausjke wrote: post #76

I actually like hacknews' comment style the most, neat and simple, good enough for talks, no images and no videos etc too. wish there are some light-weight forum code that is nodejs based, nodebb is a little heavy, and I don't really enjoy discourse's UI.

I wonder if one of the keys to HN's success, apart from great moderation, is that poster's identities are very subdued. I feel it encourages responding to the post, rather than the person making it. By contrast discourse stuffs a big image of the poster and their username in your face, as does Reddit. I find the first impression on those platforms is that I'm talking to someone with Donald Trump's head as an Avatar a…

It'd be interesting, if, at Reddit / Discourse / other places, people's names are hidden, until one clicks the post header, to reveal the username.

Then, when reading a comment, one won't know who wrote it. And can think about the content, more unbiased. And afterwards, one can click the username, in case one wants to know who the author is, because ...

... who wrote it can still matter. For example, if someone says a Linux kernel version should be avoided because of a serious bug, and he is Linus Torvalds, then you can trust that info for sure, just by looking at the name.

Re: Moving from Disqus to Schnack

#106

Post by _0w8t »

greggman wrote: post #79

first off , if you turn off ads on disqus there are no 3rd party requests. maybe that will change with the new owners but it's disingenuous to claim disqus is doing something bad here when there's an option to turn it off. Otherwise the number one reason I stated using disqus is spam. I wrote my own blogging and comment system in 2000. When that got spammed I switched to WordPress around 2008. Even with their anti-sp…

Unless a blog is popular, it is enough to protect posts with Google capture or similar. On a self-hosting forum with 200-300 daily views and few posts I got up to 30 daily spam attempts by bots that passed through email registration. Google capture removed all of that so far.

Re: Moving from Disqus to Schnack

#107

Post by rahulroy9202 »

franciscop wrote: post #95
md224 wrote: post #49

A general observation about online comments: when I read an article online and want to know what other people are saying about it, I have no easy & simple way to do so. If your blog has a comments section, that's great, but what about all the other platforms that people discuss things on? (Twitter and Reddit [and of course HN!] come to mind.) I would love to see a comments system that provided insight into commentary…

I tried to do this but I was told to stop by HN itself: https://comments.network/ Seriously thinking about giving it a spin, remove the parts that HN was not happy with and relaunch it.

what are the parts that HN was not happy with?

Re: Moving from Disqus to Schnack

#108

Post by gka »

KajMagnus wrote: post #99

Setting up a server and installing commenting software, and configuring OpenAuth etc login takes some time. If you want to skip all that, you can use Effective Discussions embedded comments, demo: https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments . It's open source ( https://github.com/debiki/ed-server , I'm developing it), no ads, and has the features Schnack has (notifications via email) and some unique things peopl…

I wouldn’t exactly call 140k „lightweight“ ;-)

Re: Moving from Disqus to Schnack

#109

Post by gka »

minimaxir wrote: post #8
detaro wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you like everything else about the static blog (static files are easily hosted and trivial to move to other hosts or CDNs, many devs like the integration with git, you like the workflow of doing everything locally until the push to publish, good hosting solutions that scale a lot are really cheap). If something goes wrong with the server you host (suddenly tons of visitors, some failure), only your comments a…

Part of the motivation for using a static site (especially GitHub Pages) is to eliminate the time, energy and cost of doing DevOps. Going full DevOps just for blog comments is not great ROI. If I couldn't use Disqus/FB Comments and was forced to self-host my own blog comments on my static blog, I'd just remove blog comments altogether.

Part of the motivation for running your own static blog engine (as opposed to Medium) is that you believe in a decentralized internet. I used to run my own Wordpress server for a decade before I gave up dealing with the security flaws and moved to a static blog.

Sure, I could’ve just live without comments, but that’s again forcing the discussion into other „centralized“ communities like Twitter or Facebook. So I threw in the time to create and set up Schnack.js to have the best of both worlds: a static no-hazzle website with self-hosted comments.

Also I grew up in a time where virtually everyone would have self-hosted comment systems on their static self-hosted websites. Only they used to be called guestbooks then. Working on Schnack really reminded me of that magic time.

Re: Moving from Disqus to Schnack

#110

Post by nkkollaw »

noncoml wrote: post #72
nkkollaw wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not talking about ownership, I'm talking about storage of data. I wouldn't be happy if Google owned my emails, but I'm happy they store them so that I don't have to run a server in my kitchen.

We were talking about ownership...

I don't know, it doesn't seem like in the quote.
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