VincentTam
commented
5 years ago Hi, this is the maintainer of @staticmanlab, a public GitLab instance of Staicman. Here's some shortcomings of some popular commenting systems.
- Disqus and Isso contain a 3rd-party script to be loaded during page rendering. The code block for loading each of them shows that the static comments are not rendered as static HTML code. This hinders search engines from grabbing the comments, which are part of the site's content. As a result, that leads to suboptimal SEO.
- Gitment, Gitalk and Utterance support only GitHub, and they require user login before commenting. This can scare away many non programmers from leaving a comment to your posts. Besides, comments are part of the site's static content, not a software package problem. As a result, using GtiHub issues for comment storage is wrong in principle and bad in terms of SEO.
- Commento is not free as in free beer. For a personal blog with small traffic, you might find a monthly fee of $5 too expensive.
You may avoid these problems by switching to Staticman, which makes use of GitHub/GitLab Pull/Merge Requests instead of issues. Under Staticman's model, static comments are YML/JSON files stored in the remote GitHub/GitLab repo (usually under data/comments, configurable through the path parameter in root-level staticman.yml), and through a static blog generator (Jekyll/Hugo/etc), the stored data are rendered as part of the content. This gives a total ownership of a static site's comments.
Disqus and GitHub are proprietary, whereas, Staticman is a MIT-licensed NodeJS app. It supports GitLab, which is open source. The offical instances and mine run on Heroku dynos, but you might build your own web server.
Image: The official public production instance of Staticman running on Heroku dyno
Source: https://github.com/eduardoboucas/staticman/issues/296#issuecomment-501979277
:information_source: There're many ways leading to Rome, like JAM Stack, Netlify Comments, etc.
See also:
References