Switch from Disqus to Commento

I have switched the comment processor for this blog from Disqus to Commento.

As a policy, the online infrastructure of NTPsec has been SaaS, because we are a small team, and we need to focus on our actual task. But we want that SaaS to be open source, just in case we need to someday host it ourselves. And as open source people, we want everything we depend on here to be open source.

One of the most visible exceptions to that policy was the comment processor. When we set it up, Disqus was only real option for "add to the template and it just works" comments on this Jekyll based setup, so that is what we used. However, Disqus has costs that I didn’t like, mainly the injected ads and the injected tracking cookies.

Finally today, it irritated me enough to search again for a replacement, and I found Commento It drops in to the Jekyll template, the inline script is just one line, the injected JS is only about a dozen KB, the comment import from Discus just worked, and most importantly, no more adtech, no more injected ads.

The only downside is that the only social login it supports is from G. I would rather that it use gitlab.com for social login, but since it’s open source, I can raise an issue against it and have a prayer of it actually getting done.

If you find any other problems with it, let us know.

And if you are using Disqus on any of your own sites, consider Commento instead.