1. Accept comments via email, CGI scripts, server-side program or by any other means that suits you. A simple hack that requires no server-side scripting: if you run your own web server, you can submit comments as GET query parameters logged in access.log, then extract them using grep, sed, etc. Personally, I use a server-side program to accept POST requests and write comments to a text file on the web server.
2. Review submitted comments. Delete spam.
3. Add comments to your website source repository as .md, .html or whatever format you use, similar to how you add blog posts as content files to your source.
4. Render comments alongside the rest of your site using your static site generator. Depending on the nature of your static site generator, this may require using or creating a template or layout that iterates over the comments and renders them.
It is a fairly hands-on workflow, so it may not suit everybody, but this is how I do it for my personal website. I see two main benefits of this approach. Since the review is manual in step 2, no spam can ever make it to my website. Step 3 ensures comments live entirely under my control, so I never need to worry about migrating them between platforms in the future.
In case anyone is curious, I (very) recently implemented a similar comment system based on email. I posted a write-up about it[1].
[1]: https://ckardaris.github.io/blog/2026/01/22/my-comments-run-...
I only accept comments via Fax ;)
For anyone else who is interested in taking a look, here is my setup:
* The server-side program that processes the POST requests: https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/0.5.0/form.lisp#L254...
* The static site generator reads the comment files and renders them alongside the rest of the website: https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/0.5.0/site.lisp#L869...
* End result: https://susam.net/comments/
The last link shows the consolidated comments page that lists all approved comments posted across my entire personal website. The 'View original comment' link under each comment points to the individual comment page for each post.
It's very themeable. If for some reason you want your comments to look like Hacker News, there's a theme here: See the playground here: https://bluesky-comments.netlify.app/theme/
https://jesse.id/blog/posts/you-can-now-comment-on-my-blog-f...
https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/Jan/adding-fediverse-comme...
* CF worker on a subdomain that handles POST requests. Basically, a JS function that handles incoming requests.
* It stores comments in CF KV and sends me a copy to telegram
* All I need to do is copy it to Markdown (can be automated, but I manually approve the comments in case of spam)
* In Markdown, I'm using frontmatter to store arbitrary JSON data
* To avoid automated spam, I have a few tricks: do not expose the submit URL in HTML (insert it via JS) and calculate a simple checksum so that automated software that does not execute JS won't be able to post. Such software usually targets Wordpress blogs by scraping them from Google. I get zero spam from it.
Everything, including hosting and workers, costs me zero.
Example: https://rushter.com/blog/zsh-shell/
My first job after dropping out of college was working with Flash and ColdFusion in 2012. Even by that time it was dated, but it was my first real dive into network and server programming so I do look at those days rather fondly.
CFML is one of those things that is simultaneously a brilliant and terrible product. The terrible part is obvious: it's a bloated language that doesn't lend itself terribly well to structure and historically has been very slow (though my understanding is that Lucee actually fixes that somewhat). The "brilliant" parts are less obvious but still cool. For example the cfquery blocks are really neat, and I say that without any sarcasm. Not only does it make it easy to write SQL directly, but there are nice built-in features to avoid injections with cfqueryparam that are easy to use, and you can simply add an attribute to the cfquery to specify caching. That's actually a really cool; I've seen people haphazardly reinvent different SQL caching heuristics and screw them up. The cfquery stuff makes it trivial and it has the advantage of doing it correctly.
Things like that are all over the language (though I haven't used it in awhile so I'd have to dig through notes to find specific examples); pages and pages of ugliness mixed with occasional spots of cleverness.
While I don't want to say I "miss" writing it, because I don't, I do have a bit of gratitude for its existence. If I hadn't picked up ColdFusion because of an, umm, "alternatively licensed" version of Dreamweaver when I was a teenager, my career would likely be very very different.
I'm asking of curiosity, when it started I disabled commenting on my web page
Ideally, the comment system should be either self-hosted or more fediverse-like. The rest is a temporary compromise that will sink in the sands of time.
Edit to remove unintended flame bait.
[1]: https://stream.place
You can now review places with an ATproto account. Any app can implement the same lexicon. Review data belongs to users, as JSON on their PDS.
https://codeberg.org/cartes/serveur/src/branch/master/atprot...
I haven't coded yet the fetching from zero on the server in case my "db" fails.
If it fails for a few hours only, it's easy to listen to the jetstream with a cursor. It it's more, we'd have to rely on exploring the graph : getting all PDS that have a record lexicon, and rebuilding the DB. Not too complicated I believe, but we'll see.
It's what https://quickslice.slices.network is supposed to do but I haven't been invited yet.
That said in Wordpress you spend zero devops time, and get comments and decent spam filtering options. You also don't need users to have a social account.
But I have few comments. Not sure if is a good solution for people with a lot of comments.
Would make moderation manageable.
"hateful comment" or "porn" data will stay on the PDS, but it will just not show up in the comments section
I haven't implemented moderation, but in principle it's "easy". On a given post, store as an attribute the IDs of messages you don't want to appear (or even its descendants). The JS will have access to the info and can just filter it/them out.
Everything is done client side.
I will not be tempted to have comments on my personal blog.
I did something similar, but with GitHub Discussions because my blog is hosted on GitHub Pages and composited with Hugo, and I wanted all components to run as close as possible to one another: https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/github-discussions-blog...
I didn't build it myself, I use Giscus, but it seems to work fine. Tough to say, though, since no one comments on my blog :)
If you have an actual goal of fostering comments, perhaps consider lowering the bar of entry.
It's not a bad suggestion at all, but I'm not ambitious enough to extend Quartz to support another commenting system, especially since the analytics from Cloudflare Pages indicates that I don't get a lot of traffic anyway.
It definitely can. Bluesky is not as decentralised as you think.
There's also rumors that the W European social network launched a few days ago is built on ATProto.
(*) the entire post, not a excerpt and link to another platform
(*) long posts - posts need to be the size of stack overflow questions
(*) code blocks - it's a tech questions, posters need to be able to post code
(*) screenshots - posters need to be able to post pictures of what's wrong.
(*) serving a static site - I don't want to run a server so a script with an iframe is best. Though it would be nice if they had a message protocol for sizing.
(*) good a blocking/dealing with spam - it should be good at blocking spam. It should be easy to deal with 1000 spam messages should it ever happen. If I have to manually delete them one at a time then no.
(*) free - haha. the stuff I write is open source. I don't want to have to pay on top of my time.
(*) a sustainable business model - not sure what this means except my impression of things like giscus is they either require a server (see above), or they're running the service at a loss so it will probably eventually die.
(*) editable by mod - the posts need to be useful to other users and often posters mis-format
I don't use anything related to github because I expect github will eventually disallow this. I would consider using github if github itself offered the service. Github has one of the best UIs for tech question IMO. Markdown, drag and drop images, drag and drop video, large message size.
I use disqus because even though it sucks, it mostly checks all of those boxes. It's worst part is code blocks. It supports them but they are hard to use.
I looked into things like giscus and utterance. They both require a server or you trusting that they'll run theirs forever. They also use that ludicris "Act on your behalf" BS github permissions system.
Twitter split into x, bluesky, and truthsocial. By picking one, you now allow comments from only 1/3 of your readers. Maybe that's intentional, a sort of ad hoc political filter or gate. But I think it's noteworthy.
Readers are free to create accounts on whichever platforms they choose, in order to follow you. And publishes are free to choose which platforms they endorse.
Notably, of the three mentioned, ATProto is by far the most open and extensible protocol, and less subject to the whims of an addled billionaire.
