While we're on the subject, is there an alternative to Disqus that doesn't load three terabytes of stuff and have all the social-engagey functionality? I just want something that does comments.
But the catch is that I don't have a free plan (yet) since I can't make any money off of users on the free plan. If you're interested though you are welcome to sign up and use the comments system for free. I can offer a few fellow HNers free access as a thank you to this community. If you decide to use the comments system, just send me an email to let me know so that I can mark the account as being on the free plan.
I'd love to see a $2 plan for blogs just starting out with <20k views. Right now 90% of the views I get are my own and I haven't gotten any comments on Disqus yet.
I really love how the embedded comments look, but I'm a bit concerned by your other sites. I want my content to be at the forefront, not the commenting system. Is that going to be an issue if I use your system, or are the extra features configurable?
Also, is there any possibility I could use my own users with your site? I don't want to have to make people sign up with another provider just to post comments.
EDIT: Your onboarding is really poor. I tried to create an account and it gave me some odd comments about an email "I specified in the config", and I have no idea what to do now. It seems I have half-created an account where my email is already used but I don't have a password to log in with. Neither can I reset my password or find documentation on how to embed comments.
EDIT 2: It looks like all the permalinks in your embedded comments point to the forum site? That's not something I want for my content, hmm.
1) I'd like the blog post & content to be at the forefront too. What extra features do you have in mind that you would want to disable/configure? Were you referring to the sidebar with the most-recent-comments list maybe?
2) Use your own users: In the future, I would want to support that. Hmm. How would it work. Maybe your website could send a message to the iframe that "the current user is logged in, with username @Someone, real name Some-One, and (optionally) email@exmalple.com?" — Or it could set some name-and-email cookie.
3) Onboarding: Ok really good to know that it's really poor. The email in the config — I should probably rephrase that, then, or maybe auto-pre-fill the email. It's the email one typed on the very first page, when one also picked a website name...
...What has happened is that you've specified which email the admin is going to have ... and later on you need to create the admin account. Maybe I could merge these steps into one. (They make more sense as 2 steps, when installing on a stand-alone server oneself — then, one first specifies the admin's email in a text config file.)
4) Permalinks are supposed to link back to the blog. However, for the blog to be able to scroll down & focus on the linked comment, I need to implement some message passing between the Javascript code running directly in the blog, and the iframe with embedded comments (so the main frame gets to know how far down to scroll). I haven't done that yet, and was thinking that for now maybe it makes more sense to link to the comments over at *.ed.community (where scrolling works, no iframe).
If you got the impression that all this isn't super ready yet, then yes that's correct, it isn't. Hopefully a beta version at the end of october. One can use everything already but ... might be a bit frustrating sometimes right now. I'm about to deploy a new server, this weekend I would think, with instructions about how one configures embedded comments.
Thanks for your reply! Please feel free to email me if you want to talk about this more (email is in profile). To reply to your points:
1) I mainly noticed the permalink leading to the "forum" domain instead of the page the user is currently on (like Disqus does).
2) The easiest way would be for me to receive an API key from you beforehand, and send you the user's email if you need that (e.g. to email them), or just a random-looking user ID, along with HMAC((email/id, timestamp), API key). This way you can replay the HMAC and prove that I know the API key I'm authenticating this user with. The timestamp is there to prevent replay attacks later on (e.g. to expire the signature after X minutes).
3) Ah, I got confused because I closed the page at some point and came back, and was getting some errors I don't remember now but that were confusing me at the time. When I realized I can just continue the flow, it worked, but yes, I would have liked it to be a bit more straightforward. I tried to log in with Twitter but you wanted write permissions, so I didn't.
4) Hmm, the way Disqus does it is by linking to https://<theblog>.com/<post>#commentid and then using JS to scroll to the element pointed to by the hash. I don't think message passing is required?
In any case, your system was the most visually pleasing and easy to compose with of the five I've tried, so I'd be quite eager to implement it in a side-project I'm working now. It's at a very early stage, but I'd be glad to give you feedback and pay for the product down the line (although I don't anticipate the project ever making any money or having many users, so I probably won't be able to pay much).
It looks like you are mostly targeting big customers (200k pageviews/month is already way beyond most private websites). I am skeptical whether that's the right demographic for such a service. The larger the website the less likely they use some turn-key solution. I would expect a much larger demand from small blogs.
>But the catch is that I don't have a free plan (yet) since I can't make any money off of users on the free plan
Free plans are there to provide marketing and free publicity, not direct income ;)
Just my two cents, obviously I haven't done any detailed market research.
Though I should have done this before starting development, I need to figure out the positioning of this product. Like you suggested, maybe I should be talking to smaller bloggers to start with.
Based on the initial feedback, there's serious demand for a free tier and people don't need much convincing to switch so I think it makes sense to have one for non-commercial personal blogs and websites. Once I have at least a few paying customers I plan to rollout the free tier with a focus on tech blogs. The idea is to avoid a situation where I'm supporting free tier users and footing non-trivial server bills without having any revenue.
There is always demand for a free tier, after all its free. Don't listen to this feedback, freemium is a marketing tool that requires a lot of capital for scaling and additional support, nothing available when bootstrapping. 2usd / month is hard too, because you will loose most of it to transacrion costs. Maybe a yearly or one time fee for up to x comments? The free version could be a trial of sorts, the first 50 comments free.
What would your longer-term plan be for the free tier? If it doesn't eventually turn into revenue, it doesn't make sense to support. And Disqus seems to think the only way to monetize the free piece is through lots of tracking and ads.
I want to limit the number of free tier users to ensure that the cost of servers+support of free tier users is a small fraction of revenue. Since the backend does not do much beyond just serving comments and reordering the comments tree, it's pretty lean.
> If it doesn't eventually turn into revenue, it doesn't make sense to support.
I'd like to third the other children to your post. I'm working on a (free) side-project that is probably never going to see more than a few hundred users per month, so I can't really pay more than hosting just for comments, but I might be able to swing $2 for it.
Thanks for the suggestion! I definitely think there is a need for a fast, private and good commenting system.
EDIT: By the way, my username is "stavros" on your site. Also, your form says "site URL" but then complains about an invalid domain because I included the "https" part, which was a bit confusing.
> Also, your form says "site URL" but then complains about an invalid domain because I included the "https" part, which was a bit confusing.
I separated the url scheme and domain name in the "Add website form". I'm planning to update it to have a single url field and handle the various cases : with and without url scheme, figuring out whether a website supports https etc. I left it out of the initial version but I'll update the form to make it user friendly.
I'm developing an alternative, me too, here's a blog post incl. demo if you scroll down to the bottom: https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments/ — the min.js.gz loaded on page load, is 150 kb.
>foxhop: I was wondering if you would entertain the idea of switching out Disqus comments for Remarkbox, a service that I'm trying to launch [...] https://www.remarkbox.com
