Meh… another comment system
I like comments. Unlike the rest of the world who has largely abandoned blog comments, I feel like they are an essential part of what makes a blog a blog.
This blog is powered by DokuWiki, so there is no native solution for comments. Over the years I had different ones. For a while I used MTC, a self-written PHP solution. Until spammers got too much and I switched to Disqus. That's what I used for more than a decade.
Of course it got enshittified more and more and it was high time to get rid of it. But what to use?
My requirements were simple:
- self hosted, preferably using sqlite or trustworthy cheap hosting
- Disqus import
- platform agnostic via JavaScript embed
- multi-site support
- support for external comments (web-mentions, Fediverse replies)
- good anti spam measurements
I only found two contenders: Isso and Remark42. But neither had support for #5.
So decided to roll my own…
Meh's server component is written in PHP, storing all data in SQLite. It also comes with a Docker container. So self-hosting is easy on any cheap host. #1✔
It has a command line tool to import the Disqus Export XML. #2✔
The frontend consists of light weight web components built with the Stencil framework. #3✔
It simply uses one database per site, so multi-site support was easy to add. #4✔
I implemented a mechanism that scans my Mastodon account for new toots mentioning my blog. It will then periodically pull in any reply to those toots as new comment. I haven't looked into web mentions, yet. But they shouldn't be hard to add either. #5✔
Regarding anti-spam mechanisms I built in some limits and checks. We'll see how they'll hold. New comments are also hidden and need to be approved by the admin. More guards would be trivial to add. #6✔
The whole thing is available at Github and can be seen in action below. There's some extensive documentation available to get you started.
Let me know what you think. You know… in the comments below 