Technology Tales

A survey of commenting systems for static websites

25^th February 2026

This piece grew out of a practical problem. When building a Hugo website, I went looking for a way to add reader comments. The remotely hosted options I found were either subscription-based or visually intrusive in ways that clashed with the site design. Moving to the self-hosted alternatives brought a different set of difficulties: setup proved neither straightforward nor reliably successful, and after some time I concluded that going without comments was the more sensible outcome.

That experience is, it turns out, a common one. The commenting problem for static sites has no clean solution, and the landscape of available tools is wide enough to be disorienting. What follows is a survey of what is currently out there, covering federated, hosted and self-hosted approaches, so that others facing the same decision can at least make an informed choice about where to invest their time.

Federated Options

At one end of the spectrum sit the federated solutions, which take the most principled approach to data ownership. Federated systems such as Cactus Comments stand out by building on the Matrix open standard, a decentralised protocol for real-time communication governed by the Matrix.org Foundation. Because comments exist as rooms on the Matrix network, they are not siloed within any single server, and users can engage with discussions using an existing Matrix account on any compatible home server, or follow threads using any Matrix client of their choosing. Site owners, meanwhile, retain the flexibility to rely on the public Cactus Comments service or to run their own Matrix home server, avoiding third-party tracking and centralised control alike. The web client is LGPLv3 licensed and the backend service is AGPLv3 licensed, making the entire stack free and open source.

Solutions for Publishers and Media Outlets

For publishers and media organisations, Coral by Vox Media offers a well-established and feature-rich alternative. Originally founded in 2014 as a collaboration between the Mozilla Foundation, The New York Times and The Washington Post, with funding from the Knight Foundation, it moved to Vox Media in 2019 and was released as open-source software. It provides advanced moderation tools supported by AI technology, real-time comment alerts and in-depth customisation through its GraphQL API. Its capacity to integrate with existing user authentication systems makes it a compelling choice for organisations that wish to maintain editorial control without sacrificing community engagement. Coral is currently deployed across 30 countries and in 23 languages, a breadth of adoption that reflects its standing among publishers of all sizes. The team has recently expanded the product to include a live Q&A tool alongside the core commenting experience, and the open-source codebase means that organisations with the technical resources can self-host the entire platform.

A strong alternative for publishers who handle large discussion volumes is GraphComment, a hosted platform developed by the French company Semiologic. It takes a social-network-inspired approach, offering threaded discussions with real-time updates, relevance-based sorting, a reputation-based voting system that enables the community to assist with moderation, and a proprietary Bubble Flow interface that makes individual threads indexable by search engines. All data are stored on servers based in France, which will appeal to publishers with European data-residency requirements. Its client list includes Le Monde, France Info and Les Echos, giving it considerable credibility in the media sector.

Hosted Solutions: Ease of Setup and Performance

Hosted solutions cater to those who prioritise simplicity and page performance above all else. ReplyBox exemplifies this approach, describing itself as 15 times lighter than Disqus, with a design focused on clean aesthetics and fast page loads. It supports Markdown formatting, nested replies, comment upvotes, email notifications and social login via Google, and it comes with spam filtering through Akismet. A 14-day free trial is available with no payment required, and a WordPress plugin is offered for those already on that platform.

Remarkbox takes a similarly restrained approach. Founded in 2014 by Russell Ballestrini after he moved his own blog to a static site and found existing solutions too slow or ad-laden, it is open source, carries no advertising and performs no user tracking. Readers can leave comments without creating an account, using email verification to confirm their identity, and the platform operates on a pay-what-you-can basis that keeps it accessible to smaller sites. It supports Markdown with real-time comment previews and deeply nested replies, and its developer notes that comments that are served through the platform contribute to SEO by making user-generated content indexable by search engines.

The choice between hosted and self-hosted systems often hinges on the trade-off between convenience and control. Staticman was a notable option in this space, acting as a Node.js bridge that committed comment submissions as data files directly to a GitHub or GitLab repository. However, its website is no longer accessible, and the project has been effectively abandoned since around 2020, with its maintainers publicly confirming in early 2024 that neither they nor the original author have been active on it for some time and that no volunteer has stepped forward to take it over. Those with a need for similar functionality are directed by the project's own contributors towards Cloudflare Workers-based alternatives. Utterances remains a viable option in this category, using GitHub Issues as its backend so that all comment data stays within a repository the site owner already controls. It requires some technical setup, but rewards that effort with complete data ownership and no external dependencies.

Open-Source, Self-Hosted Options

For developers who value privacy and data sovereignty above the convenience of a hosted service, open-source and self-hosted options present a natural fit. Remark42 is an actively maintained project that supports threaded comments, social login, moderation tools and Telegram or email notifications. Written in Python and backed by a SQLite database, Isso has been available since 2013 and offers a straightforward deployment with a small resource footprint, together with anonymous commenting that requires no third-party authentication. Both projects reflect a broader preference among privacy-conscious developers for keeping comment data entirely under their own roof.

The Case of Disqus

Valued for its ease of integration and its social features, Disqus remains one of the most widely recognised hosted commenting platform. However, it comes with well-documented drawbacks. Disqus operates as both a commenting service and a marketing and data company, collecting browsing data via tracking scripts and sharing it with third-party advertising partners. In 2021, the Norwegian Data Protection Authority notified Disqus of its intention to issue an administrative fine of approximately 2.5 million euros for processing user data without valid consent under the General Data Protection Regulation. However, following Disqus's response, the authority's final decision in 2024 was to issue a formal reprimand rather than impose the financial penalty. The proceedings nonetheless drew renewed attention to the privacy implications of relying on the platform. Site owners who prefer the convenience of a hosted service without those trade-offs may find more suitable alternatives in Hyvor Talk or CommentBox, both of which are designed around privacy-first principles and minimal setup.

Bridging the Gap: Talkyard and Discourse

Functioning as both a commenting system and a full community forum, Talkyard occupies an interesting position in the landscape. It can be embedded on a blog in the same manner as a traditional commenting widget, yet it also supports standalone discussion boards, making it a viable option for content creators who anticipate their audience outgrowing a simple comment section.

It also happens that Discourse operates on a similar principle but at greater scale, providing a fully featured forum platform that can be embedded as a comment section on external pages. Co-founded by Jeff Atwood (also a co-founder of Stack Overflow), Robin Ward and Sam Saffron, it is an open-source project whose server side is built on Ruby on Rails with a PostgreSQL database and Redis cache, while the client side uses Ember.js. Both Talkyard and Discourse are available as hosted services or as self-hosted installations, and both carry open-source codebases for those who wish to inspect or extend them.

Self-Hosting Discourse With Cloudflare CDN

For those who wish to take the self-hosted route, Discourse distributes an official Docker image that considerably simplifies deployment. The process begins by cloning the official repository into /var/discourse and running the bundled setup tool, which prompts for a hostname, administrator email address and SMTP credentials. A Linux server with at least 2 GB of memory is required, and a SWAP partition should be enabled on machines with only 1 GB.

Pairing a self-hosted instance with Cloudflare as a global CDN is a practical choice, as Cloudflare provides CDN acceleration, DNS management and DDoS mitigation, with a free tier that suits most community deployments. When configuring SSL, the recommended approach is to select Full mode in the Cloudflare SSL/TLS dashboard and generate an origin certificate using the RSA key type for maximum compatibility. That certificate is then placed in /var/discourse/shared/standalone/ssl/, and the relevant Cloudflare and SSL templates are introduced into Discourse's app.yml configuration file.

One important point during initial DNS setup is to leave the Cloudflare proxy status set to DNS only until the Discourse configuration is complete and verified, switching it to Proxied only afterwards to avoid redirect errors during first deployment. Email setup is among the more demanding aspects of running Discourse, as the platform depends on it for user authentication and notifications. The notification_email setting and the disable_emails option both require attention after a fresh install or a migration restore. Once configuration is finalised, running ./launcher rebuild app from the /var/discourse directory completes the build, typically within ten minutes.

Plugins can be added at any time by specifying their Git repository URLs in the hooks section of app.yml and triggering a rebuild. Discourse creates weekly backups automatically, storing them locally under /var/discourse/shared/standalone/backups, and these can be synchronised offsite via rsync or uploaded automatically to Amazon S3 if credentials are configured in the admin panel.

At a Glance

Solution	Type	Best For
Cactus Comments	Federated, open source	Privacy-centric sites
Coral	Open source, hosted or self-hosted	Publishers and newsrooms
GraphComment	Hosted	Enhanced engagement and SEO
ReplyBox	Hosted	Simple static sites
Remarkbox	Hosted, optional self-host	Speed and simplicity
Utterances	Repository-backed	Developer-owned data
Remark42	Self-hosted, open source	Privacy and control
Isso	Self-hosted, open source	Minimal footprint
Hyvor Talk	Hosted	Privacy-focused ease of use
CommentBox	Hosted	Clean design, minimal setup
Talkyard	Hosted or self-hosted	Comments and forums combined
Discourse	Hosted or self-hosted	Rich discussion communities
Disqus	Hosted	Ease of integration (privacy caveats apply)

Closing Thoughts

None of the options surveyed here is without compromise. The hosted services ask you to accept some degree of cost, design constraint or data trade-off. The self-hosted and repository-backed tools demand technical time that can outweigh the benefit for a small or personal site. The federated approach is principled but asks readers to have, or create, a Matrix account before they can participate. It is entirely reasonable to weigh all of that and, as I did, conclude that going without comments is the right call for now. The landscape does shift, and a solution that is cumbersome today may become more accessible as these projects mature. In the meantime, knowing what exists and where the friction lies is a reasonable place to start.

Blocking thin scrollbar styles in Thunderbird on Linux Mint

23^rd February 2026

When you get a long email, you need to see your reading progress as you work your way through it. Then, the last thing that you need is to have someone specifying narrow scrollbars in the message HTML like this:

<html style="scrollbar-width: thin;">

This is what I with an email newsletter on AI Governance sent to me via Substack. Thankfully, that behaviour can be disabled in Thunderbird. While my experience was on Linux Mint, the same fix may work elsewhere. The first step is to navigate the menus to where you can alter the settings: "Hamburger Menu" > Settings > Scroll to the bottom > Click on the Config Editor button.

In the screen that opens, enter layout.css.scrollbar-width-thin.disabled in the search and press the return key. Should you get an entry (and I did), click on the arrows button to the right to change the default value of False to True. Should your search be fruitless, right click anywhere to get a context menu where you can click on New and then Boolean to create an entry for layout.css.scrollbar-width-thin.disabled, which you then set to True. Whichever way you have accomplished the task, restarting Thunderbird ensures that the setting applies.

If the default scrollbar thickness in Thunderbird is not to your liking, returning to the Config Editor will address that. Here, you need to search for or create widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.size.override. Since this takes a numeric value, pick the appropriate type if you are creating a new entry. Since that was not needed in my case, I pressed the edit button, chose a larger number and clicked on the tick mark button to confirm it. The effect was seen straight and all was how I wanted it.

In the off chance that the above does not work for you, there is one more thing that you can try, and this is specific to Linux. It sends you to the command line, where you issue this command:

gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface overlay-scrolling

Should that return a value of true, follow the with this command to change the setting to false:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface overlay-scrolling false

After that, you need to log off and back on again for the update to take effect. Since I had no recourse to that, it may be the same for you too.

Four technical portals that still deliver after decades online

3^rd February 2026

The early internet was built on a different kind of knowledge sharing, one driven by individual expertise, community generosity and the simple desire to document what worked. Four informative websites that started in that era, namely MDN Web Docs, AskApache, WindowsBBS and Office Watch, embody that spirit and remain valuable today. They emerged at a time when technical knowledge was shared through forums, documentation and personal blogs rather than social media or algorithm-driven platforms, and their legacy persists in offering clarity and depth in an increasingly fragmented digital landscape.

MDN Web Docs

MDN Web Docs stands as a cornerstone of modern web development, offering comprehensive coverage of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Web APIs alongside authoritative references for browser compatibility. Mozilla started the project in 2005 under the name Mozilla Developer Centre, and it has since grown into a collaborative effort of considerable scale. In 2017, Mozilla announced a formal partnership with Google, Microsoft, Samsung and the W3C to consolidate web documentation on a single platform, with Microsoft alone redirecting over 7,700 of its MSDN pages to MDN in that year.

For developers, the site is not merely a reference tool but a canonical guide that ensures standards are adhered to and best practices followed. Its tutorials, guides and learning paths make it indispensable for beginners and seasoned professionals alike. The site's community-driven updates and ongoing contributions from browser vendors have cemented its reputation as the primary source for anyone building for the web.

AskApache

AskApache is a niche but invaluable resource for those managing Apache web servers, built by a developer whose background lies in network security and penetration testing on shared hosting environments. The site grew out of the founder's detailed study of .htaccess files, which, unlike the main Apache configuration file httpd.conf, are read on every request and offer fine-grained, per-directory control without requiring root access to the server. That practical origin gives the content its distinctive character: these are not generic tutorials, but hard-won techniques born from real-world constraints.

The site's guides on blocking malicious bots, configuring caching headers, managing redirects with mod_rewrite and preventing hot-linking are frequently cited by system administrators and WordPress users. Its specificity and longevity have made it a trusted companion for those maintaining complex server environments, covering territory that mainstream documentation rarely touches.

WindowsBBS

WindowsBBS offers a clear window into the era when online forums were the primary hub for technical support. Operating in the tradition of classic bulletin board systems, the site has long been a resource for users troubleshooting Windows installations, hardware compatibility issues and malware removal. It remains completely free, sustained by advertisers and community donations, which reflects the ethos of mutual aid that defined early internet culture.

During the Windows XP and Windows 7 eras, community forums of this kind were essential for solving problems that official documentation often overlooked, with volunteers providing detailed answers to questions that Microsoft's own support channels would not address. While the rise of social media and centralised support platforms has reduced the prominence of such forums, WindowsBBS remains a testament to the power of community-driven problem-solving. Its straightforward structure, with users posting questions and experienced volunteers providing answers, mirrors the collaborative spirit that made the early web such a productive environment.

Office Watch

Office Watch has served as an independent source of Microsoft Office news, tips and analysis since 1996, making it one of the longer-running specialist publications of its kind. Its focus on Microsoft Office takes in advanced features and hidden tools that are seldom documented elsewhere, from lesser-known functions in Excel to detailed comparisons between Office versions and frank assessments of Microsoft's product decisions. That independence gives it a voice that official resources cannot replicate.

The site serves power users seeking to make the most of the software they use every day, with guides and books that extend its reach beyond the website itself. In an era where software updates are frequent and often poorly explained, Office Watch provides the kind of context and plain-spoken clarity that official documentation rarely offers.

The Enduring Value of Depth and Community

These four sites share a common thread: they emerged when technical knowledge was shared openly by experts and enthusiasts rather than filtered through algorithms or paywalls, and they retain the value that comes from that approach. Their continued relevance speaks to what depth, specificity and community can achieve in the digital world. While platforms such as Stack Overflow and GitHub Discussions have taken over many of the roles these sites once played, the original resources remain useful for their historical context and the quality of their accumulated content.

As the internet continues to evolve, the lessons from these sites are worth remembering. The most useful knowledge is often found at the margins, where dedicated individuals take the time to document, explain and share what they have learned. Whether you are a developer, a server administrator or an everyday Office user, these resources are more than archives: they are living repositories of expertise, built by people who cared enough to write things down properly.

How to make Firefox vertical scrollbars more visible on Windows 11

21^st March 2025

While some articles on the web have reading time added to them, thus the vertical scrollbar of a web browser can act as a hint of the length of a piece. Unfortunately, they are being made less conspicuous for the sake of aesthetics and at the expense of utility. Since Firefox is the browser that I use most of the time, addressing the matter there became a priority for me, Here then is how you configure things on Windows 11.

The first step is to open a new tab before entering about:config in the URL bar and pressing the return key on your keyboard. If doing this for the first time, you will meet a warning screen that you can disable. Agreeing to the warning conveys you to the next screen, where you can enter the string "scrollbar" and use the enter key to bring up a swathe of settings.

There are two that you need to set to false by double-clicking on the pre-existing value of true: widget.windows.overlay-scrollbars.enabled and widget.non-native-theme.win.scrollbar.use-system-size. There is one more setting that you need to tweak: widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.size.override should have a value greater than zero, the default. Using one of ten did what I wanted once I restarted Firefox. After that, I have things as I want them to be, though you may want to refine the width setting for your needs.

Manually updating Let's Encrypt certificates

8^th November 2024

Normally, Let's Encrypt certificates get renewed automatically. Thus, it came as a surprise to me to receive an email telling me that one of my websites had a certificate that was about to expire. The next step was to renew the certificate manually.

That sent me onto the command line in an SSH session to the Ubuntu server in question. Once there, I used the following command to check on my certificates to confirm that the email alert was correct:

sudo certbot certificates

Then, I issued this command to do a test run of the update:

sudo certbot renew --dry-run

In the knowledge that nothing of concern came up in the dry run, then it was time to do the update for real using this command:

sudo certbot renew

Rerunning sudo certbot certificates checked that all was in order. All that did what should have happened automatically; adding a cron job should address that, though, and adding the --quiet switch should cut down on any system emails too.

Excluding Google trend suggestions from an address bar search in Firefox

15^th August 2024

When it comes to learning what is happening in the world, I am more LOMO than FOMO. Thus, I do not appreciate anything that adds content that I did not request. Given the state of the world right now, there is a need to moderate one's intake. When I found trending topics being added to Google search results from the Firefox address bar, I then sought a way of turning that off.

That involved navigating to about:preferences#search in the address bar (you can go to Settings > Search just as well). Once there, it was a matter of looking in the Search Suggestions section and clearing the checkbox for the Show trending search suggestions item. Naturally, this only applies if you choose Google as your default search engine; otherwise it should not apply. For me, the setting change did what was needed.

Get web links from Outlook emails and Teams chats to open in your web browser of choice

12^th August 2024

Dealing with the following message issued when using Certbot on Apache: "Unable to find corresponding HTTP vhost; Unable to create one as intended addresses conflict; Current configuration does not support automated redirection"

12^th April 2024

When doing something with Certbot on another website not so long ago, I encountered the above message when executing the following command (semicolons have been added to separate the lines):

sudo certbot --apache

The solution was to open /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf using nano and update the ServerName field (or the line containing this keyword) so it matched the address used for setting up Let's Encrypt SSL certificates. The mention of Apache in the above does make the solution specific to this web server software, so you will need another solution if you meet this kind of problem when using Nginx or another web server.

Stopping Firefox from launching on the wrong virtual desktop on Linux Mint

12^th October 2021

During the summer, I discovered that Firefox was steadfastly opening on the same virtual desktop on Linux Mint (the Cinnamon version) regardless of the one on which it was started. Being a creature of habit who routinely opens Firefox within the same virtual desktop all the time, this was not something that I had noticed until the upheaval of a system rebuild. The supposed cause is setting the browser to reopen tabs from the preceding session. The settings change according to the version of Firefox, but it is found in Settings > General in the version in which I am writing these words (Firefox Developer Edition 94.0b4) and the text beside the tick box is "Open previous windows and tabs".

While disabling the aforementioned setting could work, there is another less intrusive solution. This needs the opening of a new tab and the entering of the address about:config in the address bar. If you see a warning message about the consequences of proceeding further, accept responsibility using the interface as you do just that. In the resulting field marked Search preference name, enter the text widget.disable-workspace-management and toggle the setting from false to true to activate it. Then, Firefox should open on the desktop where you want it and not some other default location.

Installing Firefox Developer Edition in Linux Mint

22^nd April 2018

Having moved beyond the slow response and larger memory footprint of Firefox ESR, I am using Firefox Developer Edition in its place, even if it means living without a status bar at the bottom of the window. Hopefully, someone will create an equivalent of the old add-on bar extensions that worked before the release of Firefox Quantum.

Firefox Developer Edition may be pre-release software with some extras for web developers like being able to drill into an HTML element and see its properties, but I am finding it stable enough for everyday use. It is speedy too, which helps, and it has its own profile so it can co-exist on the same machine as regular releases of Firefox like its ESR and Quantum variants.

Installation takes a little added effort though and there are various options available. My chosen method involved Ubuntu Make. Installing this involves setting up a new PPA as the first step and the following commands added the software to my system:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-desktop/ubuntu-make
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-make

With the above completed, it was simple to install Firefox Developer edition using the following command:

umake web firefox-dev

Where things got a bit more complicated was getting entries added to the Cinnamon Menu and Docky. While the former was sorted using the cinnamon-menu-editor command, the latter needed some tinkering with my firefox-developer.desktop file found in .local/share/applications/ within my user area to get the right icon shown. Discovering this took me into .gconf/apps/docky-2/Docky/Interface/DockPreferences/%gconf.xml where I found the location of the firefox-developer.desktop that needed changing. Once this was completed, there was nothing else to do from the operating system side.

Within Firefox itself, I opted to turn off warnings about password logins on non-HTTPS websites by going to about:config using the address bar, then looking for security.insecure_field_warning.contextual.enabled and changing its value from True to False. While some may decry this, there are some local websites on my machine that need attention at times. Otherwise, Firefox is installed with user access so I can update it as if it were a Windows or macOS application, and that is useful given that there are frequent new releases. All is going as I want it so far.