Comments: Replacing Disqus with Github Comments

[dwilliamson]

Comments for Replacing Disqus with Github Comments

[dwilliamson]

This is a comment

[dwilliamson]

This is another comment

[dwilliamson]

This is a comment with some markdown...

• Listy
• Listo

1. Jumble
2. Sale

Boldit or Italicit or ~strikeit~

header

hashtag

something something

int x = 3;

[jasminpatry]

This is great. Thanks for sharing this!

[olafleur]

Awesome ! I think I will try this on my website. :)

[vielmetti]

Nicely done.

[vyp]

Neat!

[olalonde]

You are on HN, congrats :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14170041

[mannuscript]

I agree that what Disqus is doing is an overkill. However, we should not forget that nothing comes for free... Apart from this, getting redirected to GitHub for comment is very inconvenient... Update: So I am automatically subscribed to comments thread via email... Getting emails not only for replies on my comment but for every new comment. Well, this is another overkill... Don't forget User experience is more valued than user's data nowadays :D

Edit: @dwilliamson forget about the free-ness argument, the bigger issue is of user experience, I got resubscribed to email updates after you mentioned me in one of the comment. This is a serious poor user experience.

[rattrayalex]

Interesting, thanks for sharing!

You might consider changing the link to include #new_comment_field (like so) so that users do not have to scroll. I believe this also focuses the field by default, which may make intent more clear.

Adding a button at the bottom of the comments section that opens the link might be helpful. Using about: _blank could be nice too.

A git hook might be useful to automatically generate the issues, though I'm not sure that'd be a good idea.

EDIT: Looks like their api supports POSTing comments; you'd have to set up user auth of course. https://developer.github.com/v3/issues/comments/#create-a-comment

[ghost]

A test of comment with image and link.

[globalcitizen]

Good work. In summary, to improve the solution further, add a button to add a new comment. Only when that button is pushed (in order to preserve privacy, remove drive-by viewer tracking potential, and reduce unnecessary server load on Github), somehow determine whether the user is already logged in to Github.

• If not, then give them a chance to do so or sign up
• If so, then display an add comment form on the page This could be a modal window, in a similar style to Stripe. If the user posts a comment successfully, the comment stream could be refreshed.

[citrusui]

I'm impressed by this! I'm going to see what happens when you post a comment from the @ghost account (another name for a deleted account)

[ghost]

Hello world! This is a comment from the @ghost account.

[segiddins]

This is awesome!

[olalonde]

You might want to

1) Add rel="nofollow" to your anchor tags to deter spam

2) Link back to the blog post in the GH issue (you could do that in the first comment and not display it on your website). That way when I go back here due to :octocat: GH notifications, I can go back to the post easily instead of wondering what this is all about 😸

[ElijahLynn]

Great writeup, I was really hoping there was a way to comment without visiting Github.

[asciimo]

Very slick! I came to propose something similar to @globalcitizen's proposal, but they put it more succinctly.

[bexelbie]

Did you consider https://staticman.net ? This gets you comments as PRs and comments from the page.

[tbodt]

@bexelbie but staticman isn't as FUCKING AWESOME as this

[dipakc]

This is amazing! Thanks for sharing.

[aleman]

Great! I can already think of a few use cases for this in my team

[colinmegill]

Great idea. Thank you for this.

[crohr]

I agree this is a great idea. But why not write your post directly into the issue as well? You might want to checkout my post Turn your GitHub issues into blog posts, which implements the same idea but also let you publish right from your GitHub issue as well.

[bkaradzic]

Love it! :+1:

[lrzedzicki]

Very useful!

[andreis]

Great technique that I'll definitely steal. Thanks!

[ghost]

Brilliant idea!

[EddieOne]

test = {
  something: 'monkey',
  function: function(arg) { return arg + 'YAY!'  }
}

Edit: We need pagination!

[cerisara]

Great ! I'll try this out... is it doable with a gitlab instance ?

[spinda]

[export-mike]

Super clever!

[thehesiod]

note I filed a bug LAST MONTH where I found that the github API was returning the same comments multiple times instead of all the comments for large number of comments (500+). They have yet to say they've fixed this. So for example if you had comments: [1,2,3,4], it would return [1,1,3,4]

[modest]

cute, but... when we start needing to solve a Captcha before commenting on GitHub, I'll be sure to thank you guys

[rezhajulio]

did it also prevent executing js ?

[DanTup]

Worth noting, the API results for this comment currently appear to be 1hr stale (probably due to GH caching) which could be important to some in deciding whether to do this.

[DanTup]

Actually, they're not stale, they're paged?

https://api.github.com/repos/dwilliamson/donw.io/issues/1/comments https://api.github.com/repos/dwilliamson/donw.io/issues/1/comments?page=2

[mtso]

I wonder if it's possible to post from your blog page~ Cool implementation tho~

[tylerzika]

really cool! although I'm not seeing this on your blog post..

[kennycason]

Woah! Awesome.

println("Everyone switch to Kotlin")

[rhaps0dy]

I'm going to implement this in my blog. Thank you 😄 .

[DmitryOlkhovoi]

It's better to post comments via api than ask ppl to do it here

[rhaps0dy]

@DmitryAuine True, the notice "go to the GitHub issue to comment" is easy to miss. Well we can try to implement this. (I might at some point)

[0b01]

Check out txtpen.com. It is like medium but for regular sites

[BlueHatbRit]

Huh awesome, might add this into my Ghost blog!

[intraz]

@dwilliamson, what browser did you use for the network log screen captures? thanks for a good post.

[milch]

@DanTup It looks like if the comments are paged then the navigation is included in the Link response header like this:

<https://api.github.com/repositories/72930823/issues/1/comments?page=1>; rel="first", <https://api.github.com/repositories/72930823/issues/1/comments?page=1>; rel="prev"

So it'd be neat if the JS in the comments.html file detected if the user scrolled to the bottom, and then loaded the next page of comments if there are any.

[BadLamb]

Testing for input sanitizing

[tennisfar]

Simple and efficient. Good idea. 👍

[jfernandez]

Hi mom!