More than a year ago, I examined the state of comment systems and chose a conventional self-hosted system for this site. Since then, a few new directions have emerged: collecting distributed interactions, making email a genuine reply channel, and keeping discussion data portable.

Progress

Integrating Webmention

For research purposes, I integrated Webmention. For convenience, I chose webmention.io. Through some bridging services, more scattered interaction information can be actively collected. For example, if you post an article link on social media and receive a thousand likes, these likes can be displayed on the article1.

Theoretically, through bridging, more types of content can be collected, such as discussion interactions on Hacker News. If Nostr is integrated, the website itself would not need to connect to the Nostr network.

Email Integration

Email Notifications

Traditional comments and emails have always been a classic combination. To better send comment-related email notifications, I migrated from SendGrid to Postal.

In the early days, the email notifications of Douban’s DM only had one sentence: “You have a new message.” I found this very frustrating. Since the email is already sent, why not mention who sent it and what was said? It forced users to log into the site to view detail. Fortunately, the blog community is generally more open. If your comment on a website is mentioned or responded to, you usually receive an email with full details.

Email Replies

Since the full details have already been sent, why not reply directly? Too many notification emails come from noreply@*; only some merchants’ ticket systems and services such as GitHub are exceptions. In that respect, using GitHub Issues as a comment system is quite ingenious.

Email replies are not difficult to implement: modern email platforms can forward parsed message content to a specified HTTP endpoint2.

Using email for a comment system can make discussing blog posts feel like using a mailing list. Nested comments can be conveniently handled on the page as well.

Email Comments

Going further, why can email only be used to reply to notifications? Perhaps it can be used proactively; you could open your email client and send an email to comment on an article or someone else’s comment. People who prefer to communicate via Email are in luck, finally.

Next to the comment button, I placed a mailto: link. Clicking it opens the mail client, allowing readers to send an email instead of using the form on the page.

Visitor Identity

If you comment via email, your email address is naturally valid. The website can display a verification icon to indicate that this person used a real email.

Of course, this does not mean that the email address of those who comment via form is invalid. But who knows? The email field can be filled with anything, including someone else’s email or a fake one.

Since email addresses may not be real, I allow you not to fill in the email field at all. Enjoy the privacy and the joy of surfing the web, with the trade-off being a dog icon next to your information, because nobody knows you’re a dog on the internet.

Since even email can be left blank, the name becomes even less important. However, these incomplete replies will be subject to certain sending restrictions and may require moderation.

Sensitive Information

A comment typically has only two sensitive fields: IP and Email. My article content is based on markdown files, making it very easy to open-source. However, sensitive information in local comments needs to be encrypted and decrypted with a key when used.

Outlook

Improvements

Performance and useful small features are perpetual improvements: paginated loading, voting, search, and a better notification policy. During my WordPress years, the site was bombarded with spam comments and my inbox with comment notifications; a good comment system should protect both the discussion area and the people subscribed to it.

Integration

I see comments as an extension of the article. Without them, readers might as well read in an RSS reader, on a public-account platform, or in a marketing screenshot. Apart from contacting the author, there is little reason to visit the original. Collecting scattered information helps readers assess an article more directly and completely.

Comment Platform

Static sites are popular now, so more often people need a third-party comment system. The shutdown of Duoshuo shows that the risk of relying on one must be included in the decision. If I were to build a comment system, its most important feature would be exportability at any time—ideally continuous export—because my current system uses file storage and can be pushed to a Git repository.

Conclusion

Personal websites or blogs have become a nostalgic toy. Recently, I saw people still tinkering with third-party comment systems3 or developing their own programs and comment systems4. Nostalgia doesn’t necessarily mean retro; there should be more variations.

References

  1. Jason. 透過 webmention 來搜集 blog 的社群迴響. Jason’s Web Memo. 2022-09-12. ↩

  2. Tautvydas Tijūnaitis. Enable the use of email replies to post comments or messages. Mailersend. 2022-05-25. ↩

  3. ashin. 个人博客新增云评论留言板，欢迎大家测试. V2EX. 2024-08-06. ↩

  4. Darmau. This site has evolved to the third generation. Darmau. 2024-08-05. ↩