Trying out Commento

· blogging · geekery ·

As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve been looking around for a replacement to Disqus for handling the comments on my blog. It’s a tricky thing to manage because I’ve got a bit archive of comments that I want to preserve. The system obviously needs to handle this static site, but also enable commenters to comment easily, without needing an account if they don’t want to create one.

I ended up coming across Commento, which seemed to fulfil all of those conditions. It’s very easy to install (you just need to sign up and then insert a tiny snippet of HTML where you want to comments to appear on the page), and you can set it up so that it allows anonymous comments. It also seems to have done quite a good job of importing the previous comments from Disqus. You have to pay a small monthly fee to get the more advanced features, but I’m happy to do that to get away from Disqus.

So I’m going to see how it goes. Do let me know if you like the new system. It protects your privacy much better than Disqus does (see their privacy policy), and I hope that it shouldn’t be too much of a barrier for people commenting. Note that there are two buttons in the comment box: if you’d like to create an account with Commento, use the ‘Create an Account’ button, or use the ‘Login’ button which gives the choice of signing in with Google or remaining Anonymous. I’m very happy for people to choose the Anonymous button, but if you do, perhaps you could you write your chosen handle or name at the start of the comment, which can be whatever you feel comfortable with. One thing I enjoy about having comments is having a continuing dialogue with people across posts, so it helps to know which comments you’ve written before.

Let’s all see how it goes! I may get flooded with spam, in which case I many need to turn moderation on.