- on Sat 10 May 2014
After moving to pelican, I lost the ability to have integrated comments with this blog, except with disqus. But I don’t want disqus because third-party proprietary javascript is the roof of all evil, and I really didn’t want my website to be tied in such a way to a proprietary service, even if I never heard much negative comments about it.
I heard about Juvia last year, but I didn’t want to use it mostly because deploying RoR apps has always been a hassle, and it seems like this is too big of a dependency for something as simple as a comment server.
Then this week I heard about Isso, which is a light-ish comment server written in python, and I decided to try it out. Building isso is a pain, as it depends not only on python, but also on ruby (for sass), and nodejs + node stuff, for minifying javascript. I promptly gave up and installed the pypi release, which works and does not need all that nonsense.
Isso
Isso allows an user to comment pseudonymously, with an optional email; it handles threads (thus replies too), upvotes/downvotes (I might remove that, I don’t see the point), and lets an user delete or edit his message for 15 minutes.
On the admin side, the features are fine, with an SMTP notifier that works which provides links to delete or approve comments (only if moderation is enabled). Isso is also able to do some antispam, which is in reality only rate-limiting by IP, but that’s fine.
It seems a bit slow for the first comment right now, and the uncompressed js is a bit heavy (52kiB), but I didn’t find any other issues.
If you don’t want to use js, then don’t, and send me an email, as you should see the old “contact me” banner instead of a comment form. Comments are not moderated right now, but that might change in the future depending on spam levels.