A New Comment System?
398 words.
This was actually supposed to be published on the 12th. :)
I saw an interesting post from fellow Blaugustian Cascade: Making a Comment System with Eleventy and Netlify - cascading.space.
Implementation of comments on a static blog is a topic I’ve wrestled with for lo these past three and a half years. The short version is: You can’t do it. The long version is: You can do it, but probably not the way you want to.
I’ve been using a third-party comment system called CommentBox. It’s very lightweight and doesn’t have many features, but it’s free and it works. Kind of.
But I’ve been thinking about rolling my own comment system for years now, and today I actually started hacking together some code.
I started a new Next.js project for this purpose. Next.js is my go-to platform for anything with a web front-end these days, until or unless I find something better that is also relevant to my day job.
I figure I’m only going to need an API to retrieve comments, and a web page to authenticate and enter comments. I expect I’ll implement it in the same way as most third-party comment systems; as a widget called with some Javascript on the post page.
I tend to use AWS for all my hosting needs, so I expect I’m only going to need a DynamoDB table to store the comments and another one to store the users.
And that’s where the problems begin. Before I’ve even done anything, I already need to store a table of users, which is the one thing I really don’t want to do.
Because, you see, you have to have some kind of authentication in order to implement comments on a blog. And that means you have to store user data. And that means adding an assortment of security and privacy issues to your blog. What fun.
Is there any way to get around that and still provide a secure user experience? Nope.
But I can think of plenty of ways to get around it which leave the door wide open for users to impersonate each other in comment sections. My blog’s probably not big enough to worry about it too much, though.
P.S. I did not get very far with this before realizing I couldn’t work out something I was happy with.
Archived Comments
Bhagpuss 2024-08-31T16:16:10Z I’m just happy you have any sort of comments section that works. My new rule for adding blogs to my blog roll is going to be that if they don’t allow comments I’m not having them there. It’s just too frustrating. And links to other social media is definitely not a viable alternative. Of course, as soon as I made that rule, I realised i was going to break it immediately but rules are there to be enforcved as needed, not slavishly followed.
UV-Tester 2024-09-08T13:48:54Z Hello this is a very simple plain text static comment. It was statically generated as part of the site build.
A thousand apologies, but I've disabled the third-party comment systems because I want to freeze the comment data for the time being. Your comments are still here, but I need to migrate them to a new thing I'm working on.
This is a homegrown DIY comment system I'm working on. It technically works but it hasn't been through extensive testing yet. Good luck. Go here to enter a comment on this post without Javascript.