A lightweight, open source, tracking-free comment engine alternative to Disqus.
Check out a live demo of Commento here.
You need to have an instance of Commento running in your server. Commento is written in Go so you'll need to install Go first. Once that's done, you can build the server. First get the source:
$ go get -v github.com/adtac/commentoThen go to the directory and run:
$ go build .This should generate a commento binary.
To build the frontend you need to install Node.js and npm. To install the build dependencies, run:
$ npm installTo build the frontend files, run:
$ npm run buildTo start the server, run ./commento from the build directory. By default the server will started on port 8080. If you want to change this, you can provide a environment variable. For example, if you want the server running on port 1234:
$ PORT=1234 ./commentoNow you can embed Commento on your webpage. A trivial page would look like:
<html>
<head>
<script src="http:https://127.0.0.1:8080/assets/commento.min.js"></script>
</head>
<script>
Commento.init({
serverUrl: "http:https://127.0.0.1:8080"
})
</script>
<div id="commento">
<!-- Commento will populate this div with comments -->
</div>
</html>You can run the entire server inside a Docker container too. To do this, run:
$ docker build . -t adtac/commento
$ docker run -d -p 8080:8080 adtac/commentoand you should have the server available on port 8080 on the IP address of the container.
The Commento.init function takes an object of parameters. This is documented below:
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
| serverUrl | A server URL of the form https://example.com without a trailing slash. This will be used for all API requests and all the data will be stored on this server. Default: same server as the webpage |
| honeypot | A boolean that determines whether you want a honeypot field. This is a spam-protection technique where all comment posts with a non-empty honeypot field are rejected silently. Default: false |
Let's take a look at a couple of options (and why each is non-ideal) if you want to embed comments on your blog:
-
Disqus: Disqus is probably the biggest commenting system. In 2011 Disqus had about 500 million unique visitors every month[1]. However, a recent blog post[2] revealed that every embedded Disqus frame made about 90 network requests increasing the load time by a full 4 seconds. To make matters worse, it was discovered that they used tens of third-party tracking services on all pages. This is an obvious violation of user privacy: a simple commenting system should never need that many requests, handing over user data to that many third-party tracking services.
-
Facebook comments: Facebook is one of the biggest data collecting companies in the world - every Share button and every Facebook comments box tracks every move you do. I just opened a random website with embedded Facebook comments and requests to
facebook.comaccounted for 1.5 MB of the 2.4 MB transferred to load the whole page. This included 87 network requests and 35 Javascript files -- and this didn't even load all the comments!
While some open source solutions exist, I didn't find any attractive enough -- either they were discontinued or development was virtually non-existant. Open source is about choice so I figured I'd write my own software.
Please read The Commento Manifesto to understand what the project is and what it isn't. Commento is extremely simplistic in comparison to Disqus. It does not have voting, spam-protection, moderation, and some of the more advanced stuff. Patches are more than welcome!
MIT License. See the LICENSE file for more information.