
Ask HN: Open Source alternatives to Disqus? - pvorb
Are there any alternatives to commenting services like Disqus and IntenseDebate? I am looking for open source software that can be installed locally.
======
edoloughlin
Jeff Atwood's new venture is aimed at this space and is open source:
[http://www.discourse.org/](http://www.discourse.org/)

You can see it in action if you visit the BoingBoing forums
([http://boingboing.net](http://boingboing.net)).

~~~
moondowner
Discourse is pretty nice, but it's not exactly the same as Disqus.

~~~
cstuder
BoingBoing.net is using it as such: Comments for an article
([http://boingboing.net/2013/11/28/giant-cat-
sofa.html](http://boingboing.net/2013/11/28/giant-cat-sofa.html)) are
automatically a thread on the forum ([http://bbs.boingboing.net/t/giant-cat-
sofa/15233](http://bbs.boingboing.net/t/giant-cat-sofa/15233))

Not yet very much integrated, but that shouldn't be a problem given the REST
API of Discourse.

~~~
buro9
Don't most people who use Disqus just use the JavaScript to embed it?

At the pure tech level it's not equivalent. One required the ability to cut
and paste and be done in a few moments, the other requires you to implement
your own interface against the REST interface.

For a drop-in replacement, although not open source, I think moot.it looks
pretty good: [https://moot.it/](https://moot.it/)

They're aiming at the embeddable market for comments and forums and have a
pretty nice product.

Discourse is of course good on the open source side, but unless someone can
point me at a JavaScript tool to allow embedding as simply as Disqus or
Moot.it I think it's not the best match for this scenario.

As always... what's the full use-case? What are they trying to achieve? What
are the priorities guiding the decision making process?

Discourse wins if the important criteria here is open source and the person
asking the question is fine implementing the integration using the REST API.

Moot.it wins if you just want a drop-in replacement and that trumps the open
source.

Writing your own wins if you want a project that will take far longer than you
anticipate :)

~~~
sams99
Sam here from Discourse, I use Discourse to drive commenting on my blog and I
love it, ever since I did it comment quality has gone way up. eg:
[http://samsaffron.com/archive/2013/11/22/demystifying-the-
ru...](http://samsaffron.com/archive/2013/11/22/demystifying-the-ruby-
gc#comments) , one could build a plugin that gives parity with disqus, its
just a space we have not really decided to enter

~~~
buro9
Neat, and a question relating to quality... do you mean reduction in spam?

Or that the length of the comment and insight/wit/whatever increased?

~~~
sams99
Spam has completely vanished, got 0 in a month.

Quality and length of comments has gone way up.

Turns out that the extra click required and registration weeds out a lot of
the problem comments.

I also find that giving people space, proper preview and excellent followup
makes a world of difference (Discourse has reply by email, notifications and
so on)

Originally I was considering adding a traditional, add anon comment box, but I
am not really that motivated to do so.

~~~
buro9
That's really good info, thanks.

------
sdqali
I wrote Commentary to address this issue -
[https://github.com/sdqali/commentary](https://github.com/sdqali/commentary)

~~~
eksith
Now this looks interesting. Integration looks pretty simple since it's a JS
include via jQuery. Would you happen to have any running demos somewhere or
perhaps some screenshots?

------
chaboo
Juvia is an open source, Rails based, commenting system.

[https://github.com/phusion/juvia](https://github.com/phusion/juvia)

------
edent
Rather depends on what you're trying to achieve, but you could use WordPress.
The new JetPack plugin allows people to register using common Social Networks,
it's open source, and all the comments are stored in a MySQL database.

~~~
kijin
+1 for off-the-shelf blogging engines.

If you're going to install a commenting software locally, static hosts like
Github and S3 are out of the question already. So you might as well take
advantage of a complete blogging engine. If you don't like WordPress/PHP, just
pick something else.

~~~
valera_rozuvan
Not necessarily. talaria (
[https://github.com/m2w/talaria](https://github.com/m2w/talaria) ) provides a
way to use Github for your comments.

~~~
PavlovsCat
Nice.. but unless there is a way to install Github locally, it's not what the
OP asked for ^^

------
gioi
Isso. [https://github.com/posativ/isso](https://github.com/posativ/isso)
(Python)

~~~
pvorb
This looks promising.

I don't need a login system, so it's fine, but I think it is lacking author
urls, isn't it?

~~~
posativ
Not sure what you mean. Isso does not authorize authors, hence an author URL
does not necessarily list comments actually posted by author xyz.

------
gayanhewa
You should check out , [https://github.com/arunoda/open-comment-
box](https://github.com/arunoda/open-comment-box)

By the [http://meteorhacks.com/](http://meteorhacks.com/) founder @arunoda

~~~
ajtaylor
This looks very interesting. The Google, Facebook and Twitter login options
are great to have.

------
jeena
There are some neat attempts on
[http://indiewebcamp.com/comments](http://indiewebcamp.com/comments) but
they're much more then just open source, with it you post your comments for
other blogs on your own website and do something like a pingback, etc. Sadly
it is a bit complicated and there is not really some software for it off the
shelf, but that kind of is how I would like it to work.

------
buster
Never understood the need for disqus, it is always blocked like every other
3rdparty service but when i see it blocked i never understood why someone uses
an external service for a simle discussion in a CMS. How is it that this part
is outsourced frequently on blogs, news posts, etc. where traditionally the
CMS itself just showed the comments section? Why? I just never enable disqus
because it kind of feels stupid to me.

~~~
bjt
> i never understood why someone uses an external service for a simle
> discussion in a CMS

While Django/Rails indeed make it simple to implement per-article comment
threads, the hard part is not the collection, storing, and display of
comments. It's the fact that you're accepting content from people you don't
know or trust and publishing it.

\- Can people leave comments anonymously? Few blogs think this is a good idea
anymore. So now you need a user identity system.

\- Does that mean you're going to have your own user management just for
leaving blog comments? Probably not. You don't want to have to manage password
reset emails, for example. Letting someone else manage that is more sane.
Someone like Facebook/Twitter/Google/Yahoo.

\- So do you write integration with all of them yourself? Bleh.

\- Then someone leaves a comment. Is it spam? You need integration with
Akismet or a similarly powerful engine to help stem that tide. Doing it
entirely manually is a huge time sink.

\- But not all bad comments are spam. Some of them are ascii-art genitals.
Sometimes people just use your comment thread as a soapbox for their personal
crusades or get into pissing matches with each other. If you have many
comments at all, you need a moderation system to prevent them from creating a
hostile atmosphere that drives nice people away.

\- You have to ensure that people can't use your comment form to inject a XSS
attack onto your page, or exploit some security bug in your web framework to
take control of your server.

So people save some sanity by just using a 3rd party blogging service entirely
(Blogger, Tumblr, Wordpress.com), or embedding Disqus, or putting a link at
the bottom of the post saying "Discuss on Hacker News".

Edit: added the "like social networks" example in the second bullet that was
in my head but didn't get into the text.

~~~
buster
You let it sound as if it would be such a great hazzle to setup a website, yet
websites and comment sections existed for so much longer then disqus. And
guess what, spam also existed back then!

Ok, i get it, people are just to lazy to do that work (but they find the time
to integrate disqus...) but from my point of view they are leading me to a
website i don't want to use at all. Disqus is like a hidden website embedded
in the one i want to visit. The difference is that I know that and i block
that. Other people use that service and might not even recognize that they are
leaving their tracks on some other website they don't even know about. And in
contrast to the usual ad/cookie tracking they might even leave their email
address there.

And seriously... an easy to setup CMS, that has a "user identity system,
optional openID, an anti spam measure like recaptcha"? Does such a feature-
beast even exist amongst the quadrillion CMS that exist since the dawn of
time? (<\-- sarcasm)

When i go to blogger or tumblr or wordpress and leave a comment i am aware
that i leave a comment on that site, and only on that site. That's a big
difference. To me at least.

From my point of view the hoster of a website is somewhat responsible for my
user data. He shall not send my password to some other party, or he shall not
send my email to some other party, etc. Using disqus only shows that he
doesn't really care to the extent i would wish my data to be handled.

Of course it is up to me to use disqus, but, as i mentioned, 99% of people
wouldn't know what is happening.

~~~
lewaldman
> Of course it is up to me to use disqus, but, as i mentioned, 99% of people
> wouldn't know what is happening.

Not intending to sound ofensive nor harsh but 99% of people don't really care
with what is happening.

And... as an experienced sysadmin (+15 years), I really disagree that get a
VPS+Nginx+Apache+WP+MySQL+OAuth+Akismet running, and them, maintening it long
term is as trivial as some Github/Tumblr pages (or a static site generator)
with a pasted JS in the bottom of the theme file.

edit: added WP to the list of things to setup.

~~~
buster
People don't really care because they don't "get" new technology. That doesn't
mean you shouldn't care. One could even say that it is up to _us_ (the tech-
savy hacker news surfing sysadmins) to do the right thing.

Why WP? See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6822766](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6822766)

As an experienced sysadmin you are telling me that setting up some basic blog
with commenting takes a long time? Why would you even need nginx?! (or apache
for that matter)

------
melpomene
talkatv is a nice and Open Source:
[https://github.com/talkatv/talkatv](https://github.com/talkatv/talkatv)

~~~
melpomene
Backend in Python and front in javascript: "talkatv is a comment service much
like DISQUS or IntenseDebate.

talkatv is open source and free to use.

talkatv is embedded on any page and uses XMLHttpRequest level 2 and Cross-
Origin Resource Sharing to post the comment back to the server.

talkatv requires JavaScript, but has a non-javascript fallback which is a link
to the talkatv server with an optional but recommended ?uri={{ page_uri }}
argument. If the uri argument is not provided, talkatv will try to get the
page URI from the HTTP Referer header."

~~~
lsh
I've heard development has stalled, can you confirm?

------
Stamy
esoTalk is gaining a lot of popularity (
[http://esotalk.org/](http://esotalk.org/) )

~~~
marquis
This is really nicely done on the UI end, should be up higher on this page.

------
neilstuartcraig
I was looking for the same and came up with Moot -
[https://moot.it/](https://moot.it/)

Looks like early days but it's pretty progressing tech-wise, well worth a
look.

~~~
dylz
Not open source or self hosted? Can you point me to the repo link?

------
zengr
Yup, juvia:
[https://github.com/phusion/juvia](https://github.com/phusion/juvia) (Ruby)

------
sandman83
[https://moot.it/](https://moot.it/) not open source, but free and very
powerful

~~~
klapinat0r
...for now - which is the aspect "open source" addresses

------
outcoldman
I also started to write open source node.js platform for commentaries.
[http://outcold.2013.nodeknockout.com/](http://outcold.2013.nodeknockout.com/)
but it is not finished yet :( And actually after seeing so many good
alternatives I'm not sure if I really need to finish it.

------
lifeisstillgood
I started playing with a distributed annotation system that could be a comment
system - [http://www.annotatehq.org](http://www.annotatehq.org)

~~~
nona
Your link doesn't seem to work; do you have a better pointer?

------
machbio
why is there no mention of Vanilla forums -
[http://vanillaforums.org/](http://vanillaforums.org/) ?

~~~
ajtaylor
I remember seeing Vanilla when it first came out. It looked quite nice them.
I'll have to look into seeing how it could be integrated into an external site
- hopefully via an API.

------
shimon_e
There is some work to make discourse into a commenting system like disqus.
Like disqus it has universal accounts.

------
tradem
Boing Boing ([http://boingboing.net/](http://boingboing.net/)) is using
Discourse ( [http://www.discourse.org/](http://www.discourse.org/) ) as
commenting system.

------
dreen
phpBB

~~~
shime
please tell me you're joking

