

Should I use delegated or native comments for my niche community site? - CoreSet

I&#x27;m building a MEAN-stack reddit&#x2F;HN clone as a fun side project and toy. Although its value is primarily its educational benefit for me, I&#x27;d like to build it out and go through all the steps of a proper deployment to learn more about production and get experience with stuff like analytics, ads, etc.<p>I&#x27;m adding authentication right now and, facing the O-Auth question, wondering if I should go with delegated comments via Facebook or Disqus, or stick with my native system.<p>Since this is a side project (I&#x27;m a writer in a tech-ish field) I don&#x27;t have much time for moderation. My biggest fear is that, left (relatively) untended, my small community site will be overrun by spambots and trolls.<p>A delegated system doesn&#x27;t completely forestall this, but it does offer its own spam tools and (in the case of FB especially) a persistent user identity that might discourage trolling. On the other hand, I could do more with a native system, and if it turned out to be possible, I&#x27;d love to add my own simple spam&#x2F;hatespeech detection as another learning exercise.<p>Does anyone have experience with a similar side project? Or are there any moderators who might have insight into the system?
======
cyberpanther
Worrying about spambots and trolls is basically a premature optimization. You
call this a niche site but some how it is going to be popular enough spambots
and trolls will want to come. If it is truly a niche site then popularity will
by definition be limited. So which is it, niche or hugely popular?

Even if it is a non-niche site, your assuming it will be popular with
trolls/spambots. So as you can see your worrying about a problem you may never
have. However, you are wise to think about it and be ready.

Since you said you want this to be a learning experience, go ahead and write
your own commenting system. It will teach you a lot. Put up some small
barriers to prevent spam. Captcha, email verification, SMS verification, etc.
These are all pretty easy to do and there are services that will help you out.

Lastly, if it does become a troll hole then be prepared to migrate your data.
I would say put off writing any migration scripts, but maybe look at the
comment services and see how you can import comments. I've done this before on
Disqus and it is not too hard.

~~~
cyberpanther
On the flipside if you don't want to learn and want to just finish the project
fast, comment services are pretty nifty. But definitely don't just choose the
service over spam concerns alone.

------
matvoz
Don't worry about spam bots. One of my websites has more than 2500 visitors
daily and I am still waiting for the first spam comment. Spammers don't search
pages by hand. Their programs look for "footprints" of the usual software (ie
Wordpress) and try to automatically add comments. If you build your own
commenting system from scratch and use the good practice for building
(preventing XSS..), you are ok.

Or put it this way, if your website becomes so popular, that spammers will
customize their programs to try to automatically post on your page, you have
bigger problems :)

~~~
stevekemp
I run [http://blogspam.net/](http://blogspam.net/) which does real-time spam
blocking for forums/blogs/etc. On the whole you're correct, spammers go for
easy targets.

But I started the project when a custom CMS of mine (more or less) started
getting added to the spammer-lists. It seems like it's only a matter of time
these days until people find your site and submit 10-500 comments a day. Some
I can see are clearly bots, or compromised IPs, others are clearly humans
(presumably paid very cheaply).

~~~
matvoz
Did you have auto-aprove comments? AA is a spammers heaven, and they will walk
the extra mile if they find that kind of a CMS. Even if you have no-follow
links. Very nice initiative for the spam-fight though. How high is your
success rate? Do you use any blueprints for spun comments?

~~~
stevekemp
I'm not sure what you mean by "auto-approve" \- There are plugins for things
like wordpress which will junk comments automatically, solely on the result of
the test, but others are more fine-grained. (The API does allow
whitelisting/blacklisting by IP, etc.)

The success rate is pretty fluid but about 80% of comments submitted were
judged to be spam today. Whether there are too many false negatives/positives
is hard for me to say ..

~~~
matvoz
Auto-approve - comments in blog show up immediately without moderation or
approval.

Good luck with fighting spam. There are never enough of you!

------
tiagotalbuquerq
IMHO, I believe you need to align your expectations about value you wanna
extract from the comment section.

Do you want spread the content or you want to enrich the content? It's very
important to know.

I can see you already accepted the challenge to build the thing from nothing.
What worries you seems the hard and must-do decision, because if you chose a
delegated system you will have a big problems to migrate the content generated
through the comments.

If you want just spread the content, go with the delegated systems, FB for
e.g.

If you want to create value, build your system, it will give you space to
explore possibilities that underlies out of your sight.

~~~
CoreSet
I think I understand what you mean about native comments allowing me to do
more to enrich their content, but I'm curious about what you mean by "spread?"

Could you elaborate?

~~~
tiagotalbuquerq
What I mean about "spread"... You can use facebook comments, genius
annotations or even ask for comments in leaderboards platforms like reddit or
HN.

Thinking about delegated systems I can only see two purposes: a) Make your
project/content be acknowledged by the people (Spread by piggybacking) or b)
Cut off engineering resources regarding to the lack of value created through
those comments.

At some point, we need to decide if the comments are a value to keep or to
trade.

------
ISNIT
I would make your own one. Worst case is you learn from making it, then switch
over to another commenting system.

I think that making one will also give you more of an insight into how the
delegated ones work - that can't be a bad thing!

~~~
stevekemp
You could compromise and setup your own external site.

e.g. I wrote
[https://github.com/skx/e-comments/](https://github.com/skx/e-comments/) for a
static-site that wanted comments. You could use something like that, then
later bring it into the main app/site as required. The value here is that you
own the data, not disqus, etc.

