Some thoughts on comments

You might have noticed that I’ve made a slight change to the comments on this site: the comment threads are only visible to those who are signed in. This is a temporary experiment just to see if it cuts out the spam I’ve been getting and also if it increases the quality of what comments do come in.

I’ve been thinking about how I can go about improving comments in general, in ways which would also satisfy some of my other general long-term plans around Publ.

Right now, about 98% of the comments I get are spam, which is why I have them all moderated. Unfortunately, Isso doesn’t provide any means of improving that right now, and Isso also doesn’t allow for things like integration with existing login systems to provide identity stuff for commenters. (I’ve had more than one person complain that they’re “already signed in,” so why do they need to give a name and email address again?)

There’s also a big psychological barrier when there’s thousands of entries on this site, most of which have no comments, and also it’s difficult for people to see if any activity is going on at all. Isso does provide a “recent discussions” function but unfortunately the way it works isn’t compatible with how I handle private posts on this site, and it would end up leaking private information. (This is the main reason I switched to Isso from Disqus, incidentally.)

Anyway. I have an idea for how I could implement a comment system for Publ that could work a lot better than what I have right now:

  • Someone logged in via Publ gets a local comment form, with the option of providing an email address for replies
  • Comments that come in via webmention also get posted as first-class comments
  • Replies to comments that were posted by webmention originally send a webmention back out
  • Heck, provide a reply URL that people can use to send webmentions to webmentions in order to get a proper nested conversation (which addresses my biggest annoyance with webmention)

For ages I’ve been wanting to do native webmention in Publ but I’ve been stymied by how difficult it is to map a URL to a resource in Flask, but a while back I realized I was overthinking it and I can just have the webmention receiver also load the target page and parse the mf2 off of that to get p-uid. The webmention receiver process would also have access to Publ’s own bearer token stuff, so this would support receiving public webmentions to private posts. It wouldn’t do anything for private webmentions (or private Mastodon posts which brid.gy would fail to pick up), but I wouldn’t want to display those as comments anyway, I don’t think.

Anyway. Maybe I’ll get around to implementing this at some point. I’m not super excited to work on software these days, though.