Comments

2007-03-14

Comments feature was missing on my blog for a long time. I was looking for easy and fast to setup solution. Finally comments are completely outsourced from Nabble.com.

As I haven't much of free time to spend on developing comment system myself, I tried to find something which can be easily integrated into existing pages on xmlguru.cz (I can use PHP+MySQL on this site). I was quite surprised that I was unable to find some standalone solution—there are dozen of standalone bulletin board systems or complex web publishing systems. I do not have resources to install and administer them. They are too complex to be used just for comments.

Quick googling revealed Nabble as a free system for hosting forums. For my purposes it has two drawbacks:

you can't see number of existing comments directly below article;
you must create account on Nabble in order to post messages.

Let me know if those limitations are show stoppers for you. Otherwise I see only advantages:

zero administration for me;
spam protection (messages can go only from registered users);
no captcha on each post;
you choose to receive comments by feeds or email.

Note this is experiment. If it turns out that this approach for allowing comments is inconvenient for users I will consider different solution.