Changed my blog commenting system

Bye Bye Cusdis

I have been using a commenting system called Cusdis in this blog for a year now. Cusdis is an open-source, lightweight, and created with a privacy focus. 

Now I started to consider other commenting systems because I have had random errors it and issues, especially with spamming. Spamming is an issue because Cusdis doesn't support CAPTCHA. Recently I have received quite many comments with spam content. Of course, there is an approval process for comments, but still, I don't want to receive spam.

Spamming wasn't the only problem. Most of the blog post pages render Cusdis commenting UI nicely, but for some reason, some pages just won't render. Usually, loading the content of the iframe.umd.js (external location) file will fail.

I noticed, that I wasn't alone with this problem - Sometimes form shows on page, sometimes not - CORS issue. Someone has fixed the issue by changing the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header. I'm using GitHub Pages and according to Stack overflow discussion, GitHub Pages adds a CORS header by default on all responses. I still have no idea why this works only on specific pages (in my case in GitHub Pages).

I didn't want to spend more time investigating this and decided to switch the whole commenting system to another one.

Welcome Utterances

After some exploration I found Utterances. Utterances is a lightweight and also open-source commenting widget built on GitHub issues. It doesn't track users or show advertisements. All commenting data will be persisted to the GitHub issues. The spamming issue is also taken care of better way because writing a comment requires authentication with GitHub.

Installation is super easy, just add the following Javascript reference to your site:

<script src="https://utteranc.es/client.js"
        repo="[GitHub_UserName]/[GitHub_RepositoryName]"
        issue-term="url"
        theme="github-light"
        crossorigin="anonymous"
        async>
</script>

Read more about Utterances from here and see what kind of configuration options are available. Later I will investigate more, how to migrate existing Cusdis comments to this new system.

Thanks for reading. Happy commenting!