
Moving from Disqus to Schnack - moklick
https://blog.webkid.io/moving-from-disqus-to-schnack/
======
md224
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
occurring across the web. Is there a good reason why online discourse is still
fragmented?

~~~
styfle
I cross post to medium from my blog. I figure if people want to comment, they
can do it there. Here's an example of the original[0] and the copy[1].

[0]:
[https://www.ceriously.com/blog/post.php?id=2017-10-16-es6-mo...](https://www.ceriously.com/blog/post.php?id=2017-10-16-es6-modules-
today-with-typescript.md)

[1]:
[https://medium.com/@styfle/22969cd360f0/](https://medium.com/@styfle/22969cd360f0/)

Medium allows you to import pretty easily and sets the canonical URL so Google
(hopefully) won't get confused with duplicate content.

~~~
godot
Didn't know Medium supported a canonical url to point somewhere else. Thanks
for pointing that out. Unfortunately, I think a comment system is one of the
things Medium does poorly (I actually like Medium a lot in terms of other
aspects, unlike most of HN it seems). They seemed to try to re-use their
regular post system too much for commenting and each comment is like its own
post, making a threaded discussion almost impossible to be had or read.

~~~
styfle
Yeah, I have a love-hate relationship with Medium.

The fact that every comment is another "article" is bizarre. Also, comments
have become increasingly hidden behind suggested articles and require a click
to load.

But I like that you can highlight a word or sentence and comment on that. The
clapping thing is kind of interesting because you can give more "internet
points" to better articles.

The one thing that Medium is great at is getting an article into the eyes of
the people who want to read it, which is something that my personal blog will
not do.

Also, there is something nice about consistent look n' feel with the same font
when reading blog posts, so someone who is used to medium might be more likely
to click on a medium.com link than a ceriously.com link.

~~~
clusmore
>The fact that every comment is another "article" is bizarre.

And yet right here on Hacker News, submissions and replies are both just
"items" and the UX is fantastic. It's not so much about the way they are
represented as the way they are presented.

------
Cyberdog
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.

~~~
detaro
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 are down, not your entire site, assuming the
static hosting is on other infrastructure (and even if not, it's easily moved
again).

Maybe you used an external service before and want to get rid of it, like the
example in the article, but do not want to completely change how your blog
works for this.

~~~
minimaxir
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.

~~~
gka
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.

~~~
JeanMarcS
I wanted to do something like that for my static blog (and contact form for my
company site), and couldn’ Find the time, so thanks to you for making this !

I’ll give it a try during holidays.

------
kinkrtyavimoodh
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.

~~~
Viper007Bond
> definitely have no interest whatsoever in spending any more time doing
> DevOps for the blog.

Honestly that's why I use a managed blogging host. I have better things to do
with my time, such as writing content.

~~~
kinkrtyavimoodh
Yeah I realized that for the level of readership my blog has, even the time I
put in writing a post is probably not worth it, let alone writing template
files and figuring out the idiosyncrasies of the templating tool of the day
(which almost always has negligible documentation)

~~~
Viper007Bond
You gotta start somewhere. Write quality content and the viewers will
hopefully come.

------
KajMagnus
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](https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments). It's open source
([https://github.com/debiki/ed-server](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 people here at HN might like:

[https://www.effectivediscussions.org/-32/how-hacker-news-
can...](https://www.effectivediscussions.org/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-
improved-3-things)

Go to
[https://www.effectivediscussions.org/](https://www.effectivediscussions.org/)
and click Create Forum and then choose Blog Comments if you want to try it
out. (I hope some self promotion is ok.) It's also lightweight, just a 140 kb
Javascript bundle.

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

~~~
KajMagnus
I suppose it depends on with what one compares. Compared with Disqus, which
is, according to the article, about 750 kb, then, light-weigth. Compared with
Schnack, then not light-weight. So, maybe both "yes" and "no" makes sense.

Anyway it loads quickly on my mobile phone (before I've scrolled down to the
blog comments if I start scrolling directly) — maybe that's what matters,
anything else people aren't going to notice anyway. ... Hmm unless they're on
a slow 3G connection, then would be good if I could remove more js.

------
tallblondeguy
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](https://coralproject.net/products/talk.html)

~~~
wyattjoh
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 all of our features. If you
want comments to work on your small site, Schnack seems to suit that role
fine. Talk on the other hand is currently supporting millions of users and
tens of millions of comments. It's a matter of scale really, both are great
solutions that take the data out of a marketers hands.

~~~
andrenotgiant
I just learned about The Coral Project from this thread...

From the site, Ask and Talk seem to be aimed exclusively at News Sites (Online
Journalism.)

What's your Team's take on using Talk/Ask for other purposes like Blogs or
community sites for companies?

~~~
wyattjoh
You can certainly use the tools for anything you like! We have been focused on
working with newsrooms, where we feel we'll make the most impact. You can use
the Ask tool to build a form, or Talk to power your comment space.

Once we reach better adoption, and we have seen quite the adoption (just today
The Intercept launched[0]), we'll be able to focus on improving the landscape
further.

[0]: [https://theintercept.com/2017/12/18/comments-coral-
project/](https://theintercept.com/2017/12/18/comments-coral-project/)

------
overshard
The point of Disqus is that you don't have to host anything and you can
publish an essentially "static" website using any static website generator or
just plain HTML pages you make yourself.

At this point just build your website around the numerous CMS/Blog options
available that have numerous solid comment and spam prevention systems.

------
modinfo
A privacy-focused Disqus alternative
[https://github.com/adtac/commento](https://github.com/adtac/commento)

~~~
corobo
Honestly I think that project's using a sledgehammer to hit nails.

> There won't be an analytics dashboard with a hundred different pie charts
> telling you every which way the user interacted with the comments box.
> (There will be a moderation dashboard in the future, however.)

> Commento is not a centralized multi-site commenting system. It's simply
> impossible to be that and not have some sort of tracking.

I want this sort of thing. My clients want this sort of thing. What we don't
want is Disqus or whoever it was that just bought them being in control of the
analytics, being in control of the comments, being able to willy nilly chuck
ads into the mix, being able to go bust without warning and lose all of the
data

------
greggman
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-spam features I got tons of
comment spam. I switched to disqus many years ago and I think I've had no more
than 2 spam comments per year since.

Disqus benefits from being everywhere in that it can see a bad actor and
prevent them from being bad everywhere else. How will this system handle that?

~~~
fpoling
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.

------
gidan
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](https://graphcomment.com)

Disclaimer: I work for this company.

~~~
dsr_
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.

------
tomc1985
I thought the whole advantage of Disqus was that you can keep your static blog
static w/o hosting the server machinery for handling comments a la Wordpress?

Schnack takes you back to square one? At that point why not throw up a
wordpress install?

~~~
martin_andrino
One advantage of not using WordPress is not having to spend a couple hours
every week restoring the latest backup you have because you got hacked again.

~~~
koko775
Been running WordPress with WordFence, Akismet antispam, and CloudFlare on a
site that gets a sizable amount of traffic. No hacks yet - it's not the same
insecure mess it was a decade ago.

~~~
justizin
How often do you upgrade it, and ... is your total effort suitable for a small
/ personal blog?

~~~
nekopa
Not who you were replying to, but I helped a Luddite friend set up a wp blog 7
years ago and we had 1 minor hack about 6 years ago. It updates itself
automatically so haven't really had to do much work with it.

------
hckr1292
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?

~~~
stevekemp
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](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/](https://github.com/skx/e-comments/)

------
ChuckMcM
It is an interesting comment on the state of commenting. Gardening the
comments section is a lot of work and not something people want to spend their
time on (the Blekko blog would get hundreds of spam comment attempts every
day!).

That makes me wonder if there is also an opportunity for a 'meta comment'
section which pulls comments from web sites like HN, Reddit, or Slashdot and
puts them below the blog / article that they are related to. You could set an
arbitrary vote level cutoff limit.

~~~
tomcam
So HN pays dang to curate, then ChucksCommentScraper.io appropriates that
content for free?

~~~
ChuckMcM
That's a fair point. What I was thinking about was avoiding the possibly
apocryphal notion that stories that included a link to HN for comments were
penalized. It maybe that only stories that link to the 'upvote' link are
penalized.

------
nkkollaw
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.

~~~
Analemma_
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.

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

~~~
manigandham
That is the right way to say it.

It was originally just named _Postgres_ , as in _Post Ingres_ , because it
evolved from the _Ingres_ database project.

------
eeZah7Ux
How about integrating a microblogging system like Mastodon in websites so that
you don't have to maintain a security sensitive service just for your blog?

------
ausjke
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.

~~~
abraae
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 and a provocative username. Which does
not naturally lead to considered response.

~~~
KajMagnus
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.

------
misnamed
Why not remove comments entirely? Most people engage on secondary platforms
(twitter, facebook) anyway, and most comments are garbage in my experience.

Ironically, while trying to post this comment I got ... Bad gateway: The web
server reported a bad gateway error.

~~~
cosarara97
The author can't read the comments if people only make them on other
platforms.

~~~
ryen
Sure they can. Author could specify a unique #hashtag for the post that can be
used on Twitter/FB. Not sure about other platforms that support hashtags or
similar concepts, but its not out of the question to track comments like that
elsewhere.

------
EGreg
Web push? That's only for Android! This author must not own an iPhone

------
noncoml
"lack of control on our own data (the comments, in this case)"

That's what worries me about every single website out there. Suddenly they
consider users' comments "their own data"

~~~
nkkollaw
Why not? You leave a comment on a website, the websites stores it, it's the
websites data.

~~~
justizin
It's your data and the website has a responsibility to steward it.

~~~
grzm
I can understand where you're coming from, in that you authored the data.
However, that's different from ownership. That's determined by the terms of
service of the website. If you want to retain full ownership of the content,
in some (many?) cases you can only do so by not commenting on their site (or
service used by the site), but rather commenting on a site you control. While
some people may have an expectation that the site has a responsibility to
steward the content provided by users, and I think that's a laudable goal, at
the end of the day that is determined by the terms of service.

