Confab Comments is a drop-in commenting solution for small scale sites such as blogs.
Features:
- Passwordless user authentication via Email
- Full markdown support
- Comment edits (with edit history)
- Comment reply notifications
- Admin moderation features, including a manual moderation queue, basic auto moderation, mass deletion and banning
See the website for a demo, and see the quick start docs if you’re interested in quickly setting up an instance yourself (Docker and bare metal install instructions provided).
Source code is available on GitHub, and is licensed under AGPL-3.0.
I created this project to implement comments on my own blog. This is the first project I’ve publicly released, so any feedback/contributions are welcome. If you like what you see, feel free to leave me a star on GitHub :)
Enter email to comment anonymously
Emails are used for user authentication. I’ve talked about mandatory authentication in the design philosophy section of the docs. TL:DR, it’s to prevent spam, and I’ve made every effort to make the authentication process as friction-less as possible.
I do currently have anonymous commenting on my Trello board so that hopefully in the future admins can have the option of enabling this if they wish.
For the demo, by all means feel free to use a throwaway or temporary email.
No worries, mate. It just made me laugh, and I took the opportunity to make the joke with, arguably, one of the best slapstick movies of all time. I fully condone account creation for comment boards to fight spam, just the phrasing was funny, is all.
I do appreciate the feedback though, and I agree that it’s not really anonymous if you have to enter your email. I have removed that word from the login panel title.
For the demo, by all means feel free to use a throwaway or temporary email.
How does that help preventing spam, then? If everyone could just use a temporary email. I can see the point only if it has some sort of tempmail / throwaway domains blacklist.
That’s a fair question, I guess the requirement for an email just adds a roadblock for potential spammers. Plus admins have the option of disabling new sign ups temporarily, so anyone that has logged in previously can keep interacting if a website is under attack.
The idea for an email domain blacklist/whitelist is a good idea though, I’ll add it to my todo list.
Looks good! I’m wondering if you could fit the “Posted 5 days ago” on the same row as username as well in mobile mode. It seems like on desktop it doesn’t show “posted”, for example.
Thanks!
The reason for breaking to the next line on mobile was definitely horizontal space constraints. The anonymous usernames can get a bit long, and there also needs to be space next to the username for badges.
And I’m fairly sure I later added “Posted” for the mobile layout to make use of the extra space that moving to the next line allowed for.
enter email to start commenting
Nah, I’m good.
Fair enough, that’s another vote for anonymous commenting. Thanks for taking the time to check out the demo.
If I use this to make some kind of a «guest book» page on my personal site, is there a way to have an RSS feed of all posted comments? I don’t think I’ll be checking the page every day but I want to be notified when there is a new comment.
Admin(s) will be notified by email every time a new comment is posted, unless this feature is disabled.
As for an RSS feed, I’m not sure how this would work since Confab supports comments at multiple locations within a site… I don’t have much experience with RSS, but I’d be happy to look into it further if you would really like this feature.
Of course, RSS is the way. I mean, emails are good, but they were meant for 2 way communication. When you want to have a 1 way communication channel, RSS is always preferred, IMHO.
Even 1 RSS feed for all comments (in any location) is better than no RSS fees at all.
I will put that on my to-do list, thanks for the suggestion.
My skeptic sense is tingling.
Why is that? If you have any specific issues, please let me know.
How about adding something like hCAPTCHA ? OR librecaptcha, mCaptcha, altcha, …
I did consider this, but I thought the email requirement would generally be enough to discourage spam, without adding too much of a hurdle to the commenting process.
I think if I get around to implementing anonymous commenting, I could certainly add an option for captcha. I’ll keep that in mind, thanks for the suggestion.
