Switch away from Disqus

ZhangYiJiang commented 6 years ago

Seems we may have gone over Disqus' limits for free usage, because they've started deploying ads. We can't pay US$10 per month for comments, so let's see if we can migrate to another platform / self host this

Isso https://posativ.org/isso/

Python + SQLite self-hosted
Lightweight, simple to set up, and pretty feature rich with single layer threading, voting and markdown support
Can import from Disqus
Moderation is rather wonky - no dashboard and all moderation is done via email
No account system

Talk (Coral Project) https://github.com/coralproject/talk

Node.js + MongoDB + Redis
Heavy, but has a ton of features
Disqus import is in the works
Has accounts, but not sure how to integrate with #796

Remarkbox https://www.remarkbox.com/

US$6 per month (or US$4 per month yearly)
Can import from Disqus
Pretty good features, including nested threads, moderation dashboard and comment formatting
Has accounts, but not sure how to integrate with #796

taneliang commented 6 years ago

Talk looks fantastic. There should be a way to get the JWT secret out of Firebase (probably here https://console.developers.google.com/apis/credentials), and we should be able to get Talk to recognize it using this https://coralproject.github.io/talk/advanced-configuration/#talk_jwt_alg

ZhangYiJiang commented 6 years ago

Update: Managed to turn off ads on Disqus, so this issue isn't so urgent anymore. Should still do it in the long run because Disqus is big, ugly and has privacy concerns.

@taneliang I like the feature set of Talk too, but if we deploy it we'll be deploying an app that's an order of magnitude heavier than NUSMods just to power the comment box, which feels a bit wrong 😂

ZhangYiJiang commented 5 years ago

Commento looks really good. There's a PWYW hosted version and a self-hosted version which is can be deployed easily I think

lirc572 commented 3 years ago

Valine can be an option. It uses LeanCloud (similar to Firebase) as backend.

The problem is it does not support login so anyone can comment anonymously. Not sure if that matters for NUSMods...

Gitalk and Gitment use GitHub issues to store comments (therefore totally free) but they require GitHub OAuth.

nusmodifications / nusmods