Confab Comments is a drop-in commenting solution for small scale sites such as blogs.
I made a post about 5 months ago showcasing this project, and by far the most requested feature was anonymous commenting. I’m happy to say I recently completed implementing this, and you can try out a demo on the website.
Features
- Anonymous commenting + passwordless user authentication via email
- Full markdown support
- Comment edits (with edit history)
- Admin moderation features, including a manual moderation queue, basic auto moderation, mass deletion and banning
- Comment reply notifications and admin notifications via email
If you’d like to quickly spin up an instance yourself, Docker and bare metal instructions are provided in the quick start guide; you should additionally be able to find fairly comprehensive documentation here.
If you like what you see, feel free to leave me a star on GitHub :)
I’ll use this comment to address some questions I’m getting on the demo:
Simple reason is that a plaintext markdown editor was easier to implement. I decided plaintext was “good enough” for the kind of site Confab is intended for. If there is enough demand for this, I’d be happy to look into implementing a better editor in the future. Edit: The current editor has graphical icons for all the rich text features which automatically inserts markdown snippets, so even a user who doesn’t know markdown shouldn’t have too much trouble using it.