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Various ways to include comments on a static site (2018)

darekkay.com

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Re: Various ways to include comments on a static site (2018)

#41

Post by PragmaticPulp »

ineedasername wrote: post #23
rockbruno wrote: post #6

I'm more of the opinion that if you're sharing something, especially in a blog, then you should never add a comment section. People don't comment unless they have a point that they want to put across, which in 99% of the cases will be something negative. Just look at HN and (ugh) Twitter -- almost every discussion revolves around people trying to find things to complain about. I instead share a contact e-mail. This w…

I disagree that HN is quite so negative: I see a lot of discussions where people are productively expanding a discussion on a post. Even when it's critical though, I still see that as highly useful if it is not done from a merely dogmatic viewpoint. Picking apart an idea or argument is very useful in understanding it. This should be done especially if a person disagrees with it because absent dissection it is virtual…

> I disagree that HN is quite so negative: I see a lot of discussions where people are productively expanding a discussion on a post.

That’s why I keep coming back to HN. But even I have to admit that those valuable posts are in the minority of comments these days.

You’re right that the HN community tries to dissect everything, but a staggering number of those dissection attempts are coming from people who don’t know what they’re talking about or who didn’t bother reading the article. I’ve seen countless comment sections where the majority of comments are from angry people who clearly didn’t read the article but want to complain about what they assumed the article said.

Worse, the bad comments are often extremely confident despite being wrong. This effect is most obvious when you click on a comment section for something you know very deeply, only to see highly upvoted comments saying things that can often be disproved with 2 minutes of Googling.

The good comments can still be found, but it takes work to find them.

I think Dan Luu said it best:

> HN comments are terrible. On any topic I’m informed about, the vast majority of comments are pretty clearly wrong. Most of the time, there are zero comments from people who know anything about the topic and the top comment is reasonable sounding but totally incorrect. Additionally, many comments are gratuitously mean.

His full blog post: https://danluu.com/hn-comments/

Re: Various ways to include comments on a static site (2018)

#42

Post by rswail »

I'm in the midst of building an internal place for APIs, documentation, etc. It's shared with people we integrate with as well. We use confluence as a wiki internally, which is... OK, but.

I'm looking at redoc for the OpenAPI side of things, but would dearly love to be able to attach a static comment link to the elements to allow for questions and responses.

We have OAuth in front of it and the audience is controlled, so spam/moderation is not really relevant.

Suggestions?

Re: Various ways to include comments on a static site (2018)

#43

Post by rswail »

buro9 wrote: post #29

If you're in the UK you may wish to not add comments until after you have read the draft of the UK Online Safety Bill. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/draft-online-safe... The short of it: You are obliged to support processes to keep people safe, protect vulnerable users, provide complaint processes... and failure to take any of this seriously can have serious financial and legal penalties. The current dra…

Or you might want to check Schedule 1, section 5, which states that commenting is specifically exempt from the regulations and the bill is only in draft:

A user-to-user service is exempt if the functionalities of the service are limited, such that users are able to communicate by means of the service only in the following ways—

(a) posting comments or reviews relating to content produced and published by the provider of the service (or by a person acting on behalf of the provider of the service);

(b) sharing such comments or reviews on a different internet service;

(c) expressing a view on such comments or reviews, or on content mentioned in sub-paragraph (a), by means of—

(i) applying a “like” or “dislike” button or other button of that nature,

(ii) applying an emoji or symbol of any kind,

(iii) engaging in yes/no voting, or

(iv) rating or scoring the content (or the comments or reviews) in any way (including giving star or numerical ratings)

Re: Various ways to include comments on a static site (2018)

#44

Post by rsync »

rockbruno wrote: post #6

I'm more of the opinion that if you're sharing something, especially in a blog, then you should never add a comment section. People don't comment unless they have a point that they want to put across, which in 99% of the cases will be something negative. Just look at HN and (ugh) Twitter -- almost every discussion revolves around people trying to find things to complain about. I instead share a contact e-mail. This w…

"I'm more of the opinion that if you're sharing something, especially in a blog, then you should never add a comment section."

I have developed something I call an "Iceberg Article"[1] which is "... a single page of writing which links to a larger collection of supporting documents, resources and services."

One of those supporting resources could be a discussion thread - or even a forum.

I don't think every "Iceberg Article" needs to have a discussion - and none of mine do, as of yet. I think it can have its place, however.

[1] https://john.kozubik.com/pub/IcebergArticle/tip.html

Re: Various ways to include comments on a static site (2018)

#45

Post by rsync »

I am confused about the self-hosted section of this document ...

If I operate a static site, presumably I am using neither php nor a database ... and I wouldn't add things like that to enable comments.

But then how do the comments function ?

Are there really javascript-only comment engines that store their data ... in flat files ? I'm not sure that's possible ...

Re: Various ways to include comments on a static site (2018)

#46

Post by Reitet00 »

rockbruno wrote: post #6

I'm more of the opinion that if you're sharing something, especially in a blog, then you should never add a comment section. People don't comment unless they have a point that they want to put across, which in 99% of the cases will be something negative. Just look at HN and (ugh) Twitter -- almost every discussion revolves around people trying to find things to complain about. I instead share a contact e-mail. This w…

> People don't comment unless they have a point that they want to put across, which in 99% of the cases will be something negative.

Counterpoint: I've created a blog with highly technical content a couple of years ago and put there a simple home-grown commenting system with manual moderation. I expected a lot of low quality content but actually your 99% were rather a 9% and some people spent serious time writing excellent in depth comments, pointing out the limitations of the subject or extending it it one way or another.

I guess the quality of the comments on receives is directly proportional to the time taken by the content creator to deliver good quality articles and the site UX in general. Of course there's always some noise and spam but small sites are not Reddit or HN and the comment sections don't necessarily need to reflect what you see here or on other big social sites.

Re: Various ways to include comments on a static site (2018)

#47

Post by jrochkind1 »

rockbruno wrote: post #6

I'm more of the opinion that if you're sharing something, especially in a blog, then you should never add a comment section. People don't comment unless they have a point that they want to put across, which in 99% of the cases will be something negative. Just look at HN and (ugh) Twitter -- almost every discussion revolves around people trying to find things to complain about. I instead share a contact e-mail. This w…

On the blog that I used for software engineering content, I would routinely get helpful things in the comments, people adding on with useful content for other readers.

Back when I blogged and people read blogs and commented on them.

Re: Various ways to include comments on a static site (2018)

#48

Post by brundolf »

I wrote some code for my site that 1) finds the most active link to the post on HN, and 2) uses the HN API to pull in and render its comments at the bottom. The site is statically-rendered, but there's a bit of client-side JS that loads the latest comments when you visit the page. Most of the work is done on the back-end; the front-end just grabs the content and drops it in.

Example: https://www.brandons.me/blog/three-types-of-data

Implementation: https://github.com/brundonsmith/website/blob/master/src/load...

Re: Various ways to include comments on a static site (2018)

#49

Post by nybble41 »

rswail wrote: post #43
buro9 wrote: post #29

If you're in the UK you may wish to not add comments until after you have read the draft of the UK Online Safety Bill. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/draft-online-safe... The short of it: You are obliged to support processes to keep people safe, protect vulnerable users, provide complaint processes... and failure to take any of this seriously can have serious financial and legal penalties. The current dra…

Or you might want to check Schedule 1, section 5, which states that commenting is specifically exempt from the regulations and the bill is only in draft: A user-to-user service is exempt if the functionalities of the service are limited, such that users are able to communicate by means of the service only in the following ways— (a) posting comments or reviews relating to content produced and published by the provider…

> relating to content produced and published by the provider of the service

How many places can claim that their comment section can only be used for such comments, and not for any other content? You would need to manually screen everything that was submitted to ensure it didn't stray off-topic.

Re: Various ways to include comments on a static site (2018)

#50

Post by nybble41 »

rsync wrote: post #45

I am confused about the self-hosted section of this document ... If I operate a static site, presumably I am using neither php nor a database ... and I wouldn't add things like that to enable comments. But then how do the comments function ? Are there really javascript-only comment engines that store their data ... in flat files ? I'm not sure that's possible ...

I've used some systems where visitors to the site connect to each over WebRTC to share and synchronize content. The LocalStorage API is generally used on the clients for persistence. One such system is GUN, which even has a brief example[0] demonstrating the core data structure of a blog with a comment section.

As you would expect, it's not very stable unless either there is a lot of traffic (constant visitors) to keep the data live or you deploy a dedicated "superpeer" for that purpose. If a new visitor arrives and there are no other peers to synchronize with then they will just see a blank page.

[0] https://gun.eco/docs/Design-Examples

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