I've been using Disqus to enable comments on this blog, and I didn't put a lot of thought into the decision to choose Disqus (In my mind Disqus is a de-facto standard for comments).
Although I don't use it a lot, I have 2 major issues with Disqus:
- Disqus emails often end up in spam, and I have a really hard time configuring correct email settings for Disqus
- Disqus does some shady stuff, with regards to tracking
A friend's blog uses utterance.es, which describes itself as a lightweight comments widget built on GitHub Issues. For each post, it opens an issue in a pre-configured repository, and user comments appear as comments on the linked issue. I really like the idea, and wanted to make the switch.
Making the switch took me 5 minutes, and everything was ready to go!
Configuring utterance.es
The first step is to install the utterance.es app on the repository you want to use. This is pretty simple, and is the same as allowing a 3rd party GitHub application.
Next, we need to add the snippet that enables comments. This needs to be added to the templates/page.html file since we want comments to be enabled below each page (either a post/til). This is the snippet, for my website
<script src="https://utteranc.es/client.js"
repo="mukul-mehta/mukul-mehta.github.io"
issue-term="pathname"
label="comment"
theme="preferred-color-scheme"
crossorigin="anonymous"
async>
</script>
The repo field is set to the repository I want to configure issues on, issue-term dictates the title of the issue (pathname of the specific post in this case, can also be the full URL), label is an optional field that adds labels to comments created via utteranc.es, and theme can be chosen from a list on the utteranc.es website.
And done! Configuring utteranc.es was literally that easy. Would definitely recommend switching, if you use Disqus. The only issues I see are:
- If you don't have a GitHub account, or don't want to link your GitHub account to comments you make, there's no way to comment
- No threads: Disqus had threads, which was a logical way to structure a conversation, and GitHub issues does not support threads :(