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 :)
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.
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.