[benfrain]

I’m amazed no-one has mentioned the lack of a built-in commenting feature.

The makers of Ghost are here appreciating the benefits of comments but sadly they haven’t made there way to Ghost yet.

I’d love to move to Ghost from Wordpress but commenting is essential.

And no. 3rd party Garbage like Disqus isn’t a viable option.

[lookingsideways]

Built-in commenting is planned as part of the Memberships & Subscriptions feature[0]. Ghost needs a robust visitor authentication system for native commenting to work well and that will also involve a big concept-shift for Ghost's front-end from static generation to each page load potentially being dynamic.

In the meantime, Discourse[1] and Talk[2] are great options that can be self-hosted if needed and integrate well. If you look at them you can see the level of effort that is required to do commenting, moderation, and spam protection well at scale.

[0] https://forum.ghost.org/t/memberships-subscriptions/377 [1] https://www.discourse.org [2] https://coralproject.net/talk/

[KajMagnus]

Here's another one: Talkyard — different from Discourse and Mozilla Talk, in that it looks more like Hacker News and Disqus: threaded comments, best first, Like votes.

It's free and open source, beta software (more risky than those two others), I'm developing it. There's SaaS hosting (no ads, no tracking — costs money instead) for people who don't want to install on their own server.

Demo: https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments, read about it: https://www.talkyard.io/blog-comments

\\\*

Curious about how you have in mind that built-in commenting will look & work. Disqus, Talk and Discourse are all fairly different from each other, right, and I'm a bit wondering which approach you'll take. B.t.w. looks interesting with SSO & full community integration.

[schlagetown]

My current favorite solution for comments is Discourse — they actually have a great plugin for WordPress that replaces the default WP comments. Maybe overkill for some, but really nice when building a real community (ongoing discussion rather than drive-by commenting) is a priority. I could see this being a similarly nice solution for Ghost! Though simpler native commenting support would be cool too.

[funkdified]

Have you ever looked at all the third party scripts loaded by disqus? Garbage.

[yelkarthik]

Not to bomb the conversation here - Just trying to sell a product ;). We are building a user engagement tool called Metype.

The good thing about this tool is you can customize it the way you want it to look. The look and feel of the comments can match your website's design. You can use our simple javascript implementation and integrate it into your Ghost site. If you decide to stay on wordpress we do have a easy to use wordpress plugin too!

Please visit https://www.metype.com if you want to see the other products we provide. Do shoot us an email or chat with us on our site if you want to give it a shot or provide us feedback.

[eugeniub]

Oof, commenting is the only thing tempting me to use WordPress on some of my websites over Jekyll.

[bovermyer]

I'm curious as to why commenting is essential for you.

[benfrain]

The comments on a blog post are often as useful as the post itself. They are also directly related to the content of the post. Why would I want that information stored anywhere else but with the post itself? Especially with a 3rd party? To say conversation can be done with other services just seems like passing the buck to me.

[yelkarthik]

I think it depends on the kind of content and audience but surely but I'm also curious.

[laxis]

while it's not a great solution, a seperate local comment-system that's loaded from your template might be your best bet.

i remember someone linking isso[0] some time ago; haven't used it at all, but it came to mind (mostly because of the 'big data' comment on the landing page)

[0] https://posativ.org/isso/

[gkoberger]

A lot of blogs do just this... use Hacker News, Reddit or Twitter as their comments. Comments on blogs have become less relevant as time goes on.

That being said, there are some decent Open Source Disqus clones out there you could probably use!

[always_good]

Blog comments are visible and open to anyone reading the blog post. And the blog author can always see them and reply to them instead of chasing discourse across the internet.

Reddit and HN topics become read-only after some time, so I'm not sure how they can replace blog comments.

Twitter for comments, I don't understand. I guess you link to your canonical tweet and people reply to it? I find threaded conversation on Twitter to be just about unbearable.