Commenting

[Floppy]

Allow commenting on some content types. Using disqus or some similar self-hosted solution.

[Floppy]

Things to check out:

• [x] Juvia
• [x] Disqus
• [x] Moot
• [x] Discourse

any others?

[Floppy]

Had a go with Juvia, and had commenting up and running on our news frontend in about 20 minutes from nothing at all. It's very very easy to embed, and comes with a nice admin panel.

Pros:

• Very simple setup
• Self-hosted, so we have all the data
• Markdown support in comments
• Built in Rails, so we understand it well to make changes

Limitations:

• No threaded comments. Replies include quoted text instead. This is by design and is unlikely to change.
• No login with social networks, it's just 'enter name and email'. No login or notification for commenters at all in fact, currently.

The project seems pretty open to enhancements via PR, so we could add our own.

[Floppy]

Disqus is simple to integrate, like Juvia, but adds a few things:

Plus:

• User login and notification, including social media
• Some basic analytics
• Lots of moderation and filtering options
• Threading

Minus:

• Not self-hosted - vulnerable to bankruptcy.
• Data access; there is an API, but I'm not sure how complete it is. However, we don't really know what we want here, so this may not matter.
• Not open source, so we can't customise or fix upstream.

[Floppy]

Moot is a hosted system similar to Disqus. It works for comment threads in a similar way, but also support forum-style.

Pros:

• Full data access - download in JSON
• Threading available

Minus:

• Again, hosted. Moot not as established as Disqus.
• Focused on forum-style, not comment style. Will probably be fine though.

[Floppy]

Discourse is a new, open source, forum system. It's being used by BoingBoing.

Pros:

• Self-hosted
• Open Source
• Shiny and new
• Notifications, mentions, social media login
• Community moderation

Cons:

• Forum-oriented. BB are using it for comments, though they're not real comments. They have a forum thread for each post and pull the 'best' from each forum thread to show under the articles. You leave the page to comment.

[Floppy]

From what I can see, Juvia is the only open source comment-specific system. Discourse has some very nice features, but its focus on forum rather than commenting may not be what we want.

[Floppy]

I think, given our agile approach, the minimum viable way to proceed is to use Juvia. We can upgrade to something more complete (or implement extra features) as and when we want. Need to check with stakeholders that this is reasonable though. Slightly tricky with all the grown-ups on holiday, but I'll find someone to talk to.

[Floppy]

We decided this morning that going for a MVP commenting system was preferable to something big and complex, with the view that it won't take long and we can change later if we really want to. Agile, etc. So, we're settled on Juvia for now.

I've created a juvia rails gem in https://github.com/theodi/juvia_rails, which makes rails integration withe Juvia painfully easy (which should be good for ODCs). I'm just looking at tweaking Juvia itself to be slightly more 12-factor deploy friendly, and we can then get a production instance up and running, ready for WO to integrate with ODCs.

[Floppy]

So, there are a number of parts to this. Here they are:

• [x] Juvia deployment setup
• [x] Juvia_rails gem for simple integration
• [x] Quirkafleeg script integration for configuration
• [x] commenting integrated into news frontend as example

[Floppy]

We will add commenting properly as we go through the frontends, using the juvia_rails integration.

[Floppy]

This now works: http://news.162.13.86.153.xip.io/your-code-sucks

[pikesley]

Automating this took longer than anticipated, but it now works.