Alternative chat systems

[minecraftchest1]

Branch off of discussion in #141

Possible options

• Cactus comments cactus.chat
  • Open Source
  • Self-hostable
  • Powered by Matrix
    • Distributed (no single point of failure)
    • Users can use their existing accounts
    • Users can follow thread from their own matrix client
  • Users can post without account
• Utterances utteranc.es
  • Open Source
  • Not easily self-hostable (uses azure or cloudflare workers (not sure which), see https://github.com/utterance/utterances/issues/42)
  • Uses GitHub issues
  • Users require a GitHub account to comment.
• Disqus disqus.com
  • Closed Source
  • Freemimum (add supported free plan)
  • Not self-hostable
  • Users require Disqus account (without Buisness plan)
  • Write a cusom comments system
  • Open Source?
  • Self-hosted
  • ...?

These are by no means the only options. These are simply the ones I know off the top of my head. Please comment down below if you have more and I will update this post.

[geerlingguy]

Thanks; ultimately I do love the comments on my blog, and have learned (and discussed) a ton of good info over the years.

A few criteria I'd need if going to something static like Hugo and self-hosting comments:

• Need some sort of spam prevention (I currently use Cleantalk, and it works pretty darn good—I get around 1,000 spam comments per week, and maybe 20-40 good comments).
• Would like to be able to moderate the comments (I get every non-spam comment to my email and I click approve/delete).
• Needs to be able to import all my existing comments and display them with threaded replies as close to what they look like today.