Feature request: Add staticman commenting system about jekyll-text-theme HOT 5 OPEN

I'm still busy with my exams, which should finish around next week. Personally speaking I think a plugin system is another layer of complexity which would be a mess to both maintain and develop overtime, let alone this feature basically requires 2-3 html files with some Liquid, no reason to go as far as creating another superset on top of Jekyll. So about commenting systems:

Disqus

Pros

• Easy to install(literally 5 mins setup time)
• Okay-ish spam detection(it mostly works)
• No ads on no-profit websites
• Free* (paid plans offer some nice features)
• Allows Login through many services(Facebook, Twitter, etc...)

Cons

• 3rd party host(Comments are owned by Disqus, there goes your privacy)
• Bad performance(although it's lazy loaded, Disqus is still a snail compared to the whole website, which is the whole point about static websites)
• Ads(if you have even a donation button on your website, you will get them)
• Threads are *#@!(good luck keeping up with a nestled discussion on Disqus, it sucks, it's evil)
• No theming(on free plans, you can't style Disqus to fit your theme/tastes)
• Guest comments tend to be recognized as spam even when they're not

Staticman

Pros

• Free and open source
• Comments can be themed however you wish
• Comments are static files, thus no need for javascript madness and loading from 3rd parties. It's fast
• No login required(that's a big pro imho, because not everyone might want to register only for commenting something on a single website)
• Fully integrated with Github(in manual moderation, comments are PRs to the site basically)
• Comments can be styled using markdown(another big pro imho)

Cons

• Setup is a bit involved(you have to set permission rights to staticbot in your repo, and you have to edit some stuff)
• Moderation can be a problem(you can choose to approve every single comment manually, or let akimset recognize the spam, it generally works)
• Notification emails need to be forwarded through third party services like Mailgun(which is capped at 10k emails per month on free plan, not a big issue for me tho)
• As comments are static files linked to your repo, this can take its toll on building time, not by much however since they are basically text only files
• Github only, at the time of writing Bitbucket and Gitlab are not supported

I think that's about it, more or less. Gitalk requires you to have a Github account to post a comment, which is fine for developer oriented websites, but many aren't and the login barrier is always a bad thing imho for the general audience. Opinions? Or an alternative to staticman?

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Looking forward to your pull request : )

With so many features, maybe I should work out a plugin system.

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So no plugin system🙃( too complex for a theme ), but I change the _includes's directory structure. now the commenting systems are placed under the _include/comment-providers directory.

And also the next version would add a provider setting entry to comment, analytics and pageview settings in config.yml. That means the new settings is not compatibility to the former version...

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thx for the long analysis about commenting systems.

It's necessary to add support for a commenting system like "staticman".

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I'm still busy with my exams, which should finish around next week. Personally speaking I think a plugin system is another layer of complexity which would be a mess to both maintain and develop overtime, let alone this feature basically requires 2-3 html files with some Liquid, no reason to go as far as creating another superset on top of Jekyll. So about commenting systems:

Disqus

Pros

• Easy to install(literally 5 mins setup time)
• Okay-ish spam detection(it mostly works)
• No ads on no-profit websites
• Free* (paid plans offer some nice features)
• Allows Login through many services(Facebook, Twitter, etc...)

Cons

• 3rd party host(Comments are owned by Disqus, there goes your privacy)
• Bad performance(although it's lazy loaded, Disqus is still a snail compared to the whole website, which is the whole point about static websites)
• Ads(if you have even a donation button on your website, you will get them)
• Threads are *#@!(good luck keeping up with a nestled discussion on Disqus, it sucks, it's evil)
• No theming(on free plans, you can't style Disqus to fit your theme/tastes)
• Guest comments tend to be recognized as spam even when they're not

Staticman

Pros

• Free and open source
• Comments can be themed however you wish
• Comments are static files, thus no need for javascript madness and loading from 3rd parties. It's fast
• No login required(that's a big pro imho, because not everyone might want to register only for commenting something on a single website)
• Fully integrated with Github(in manual moderation, comments are PRs to the site basically)
• Comments can be styled using markdown(another big pro imho)

Cons

• Setup is a bit involved(you have to set permission rights to staticbot in your repo, and you have to edit some stuff)
• Moderation can be a problem(you can choose to approve every single comment manually, or let akimset recognize the spam, it generally works)
• Notification emails need to be forwarded through third party services like Mailgun(which is capped at 10k emails per month on free plan, not a big issue for me tho)
• As comments are static files linked to your repo, this can take its toll on building time, not by much however since they are basically text only files
• Github only, at the time of writing Bitbucket and Gitlab are not supported

I think that's about it, more or less. Gitalk requires you to have a Github account to post a comment, which is fine for developer oriented websites, but many aren't and the login barrier is always a bad thing imho for the general audience. Opinions? Or an alternative to staticman?

@maddovr Detailed analysis 👍. After a year of development, some points about Staticman have to be updated.

Pros

• The second point about theming can be substantialised by the following examples:
  1. adding scores ⭐ to HTML forms
  2. enable Markdown preview
  3. integrated reCaptcha support (see the second example, not supported in isso-comments/isso#201)
• The fourth point can be elaborated: both unauthenticated and authenticated comments are, in principle, possible, depending on the site owner's choice.
• The fifth point can be updated as "fully integrated with GitHub and GitLab" due to eduardoboucas/staticman#219. Moderation can be switched either on or off. In the later case, comments are directly pushed into the GitHub/GitLab repo.

Cons

• The last point has to be updated. GitLab support is already there for almost a year.

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