Utterances – Commenting Powered by GitHub Issues

There’s differing opinions as to whether or not you should enable commenting on your blog. I happen to like the idea of people being able to easily comment and ask questions on various articles. When you put a commenting box on your site, it will invites spammers, bots, and ne’er-do-wells. Thus, it’s important that you have a commenting system that cuts down on spam as much as possible.

In the past, I’ve used the built in commenting system integrated with WordPress, and it works quite well. However, this site is published using Ghost. Ghost recently added the option to allow people to comment on articles and simultaneously subscribe, but I’m not fond of their integration and implementation of comments. First off, you’ll need to enable a third party emailing system. Secondly, the main emailing system that Ghost employs is Mailgun. I don’t want to sign up for a Mailgun account and give them my credit card information, so it’s a no go for me. Yes, you can hack together a third party smtp mailing system, and I’ve tried that, but it’s a half baked solution and not one I’m fond of. So, I started looking for alternatives.

I’ve used Disqus, Commento, Facebook (now deprecated), Remarkbox, and a few others. Today, I found an option that is lightweight, free, works fantastic, and is super easy to add or delete from any blog page. It’s called Utterances. Just follow the directions on their site and you’ll be up and running!

In order to enable comments on a given page, I embed the following code on any given article:

<script src="https://utteranc.es/client.js"
        repo="bershatsky/bershatsky-net-comments-utterances"
        issue-term="url"
        theme="github-light"
        crossorigin="anonymous"
        async>
</script>

2023-02-01 Update

This blog is now powered by Hugo using a custom theme called Atega that I purchased from Theme Forest. By default it uses Disqus. The developer has coded this site in such a way that I find Disqus the best for this particular site, but initially I tested this site using Utterances, and worked just fine.