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Today, I've decided to give up on my blog's commenting system.

I've been blogging for almost 20 years. I have received 13,007 comments on 978 of my posts. So why am I stopping now?

Blog post:
→ https://www.davidrevoy.com/article980/ive-decided-to-give-up-on-my-blogs-commenting-system

#blog #selfhosting #pluxml #moderation
A digital pencil drawing of Pepper, a young witch, with a pose of 'feeling sorry'.

License: CC-BY 4.0
a tough choice but it's nice that you are placing your mental health first!
Understandable, at those scales you need a moderators team, even smaller Discord servers tend to have at least a few
sad but totally understandable. I've no comment system for the exact same reason, and asked to disable it if possible on some other occasions.

And you got death threads... wow? Didn't see that coming... so sorry to hear that but I hope you still get nice feedback on your posts here.
I don't know if you'd be interested but it's possible to replace them with comments coming from the fediverse: https://cassidyjames.com/blog/fediverse-blog-comments-mastodon/

Probably needs a lot of elbow grease to adapt to other blogging platforms, but maybe it's worth knowing about. 😀
@mariusor Hey, I mention in the article I tried. Thank you.

See the screenshot under for my comments system integration (on right) in-sync with my Mastodon account (on left).

It was cached, used PHP and API, and was working nicely. I made it from scratch.

Except for a single big issue: my mastodon instance flushes all the external messages after 30 days. I realized it after 2 days of dev... ... It's pointless to just show comments doomed to disappear after a month on a blog.
A side by side column of Mastodon comments; and on right the integration of the same comments (with cat avatars) on my blog. It was made in PHP with the Mastodon API and it used a cache.
😁 sorry, I guess I didn't pay proper attention to the text.
No problem, that was a good excuse for me to share proudly a screenshot result of the code I took 2 days on it and never used 😆
This entry was edited (1 year ago)
@mariusor Why not copy the incoming fediverse comments locally to avoid deletion?
@f4grx

That is what I was about to suggest !
Get the comments from the Fedi
Save 'em locally
Filter & display 'em on the website :amethyst:

@davidrevoy @mariusor
@diarra @f4grx There is a legal issue doing that, if you mirror this way, it breaks the GDPR European regulation. You can, but you have to propose to the owner of the comments a right for deletion, edition, changing name, and forgetting all their comment (and this, in less than 24h). On a small blog like I do, it requires the dev of a custom tool for management I don't have.

@mariusor
@diarra @mariusor ah, yes, thats why you cant, of course.
@diarra @f4grx @mariusor il faudrait se baser sur l'IP et le pseudo comme les gĂ©nĂ©rateurs d'avatar pour Ă©diter le post peut-ĂȘtre ?
@jerry_wham Sans doute. En tout cas, c'est compliquĂ© d'authentifier qqun⋅e : certains fournisseurs d'accĂšs change l'IP. Certain⋅e⋅s changent de pseudo, ou l'orthographie mal en cours de route. Ca rends toutes opĂ©ration de batch sur une identitĂ© dans un blog une opĂ©ration souvent difficile et avec une authentification basĂ© sur la bonne foie. J'ai eu le cas une seule fois avec PLuXML pour le droit Ă  l'oubli de coms, et c'Ă©tait plus d'une heure dĂ©diĂ© de taf pour ça.

@diarra @f4grx @mariusor
Bon apparemment t'as creusé le sujet GRPD ; c'est sûr que si les users doivent obligatoirement avoir la possibilité de supprimer (mais pas éditer, n'est ce pas ?) leurs commentaires, ça complexifie la tùche.

Dans ce cas ne pourrait-on pas leur encoyer un lien unique par un bot masto dédié, qui enverrait un toot direct (privé) en cas de demande de suppression ?

@jerry_wham @f4grx @mariusor
@diarra Alors si: les messages doivent offrir la possibilitĂ© d'ĂȘtre Ă©ditĂ©. Mais ça peut-ĂȘtre en envoyant un email, sous 24h (ça doit ĂȘtre Ă©cris dans les ToS).

Pour des solutions techniques; le mieux c'est encore le compte avec login/pass; et laisser l'user Ă©diter/supprimer ses trucs; c'est ce que je conseillerai aux espaces commentaires de blog moderne. Mais ça transforme vite un simple espace commentaire en un forum 😆

@jerry_wham @f4grx @mariusor
Non... Des menaces de mort, sérieusement? T'es un des types les plus chics que je connaisse, toujours simple et bienveillant, et qui donne et partage sans rechercher de retour. Je suis atterré par ce que j'ai lu et appris là... #soutien
@oliviersaraja Merci, oui. Et tu imagines le niveau de harcÚlement qu'il faut pour que je me décide à faire tout un dossier et aller faire une déposition. C'est comme ça, certains s'amuse.

Tiens, j'ai guardé une fois ce vieux screenshot:
Une copie d'Ă©cran avec des insultes et des menaces de mort.
Atterré n'est finalement pas un mot assez fort. Je suis en train de me remplir de colÚre... Courage, mon ami.
@oliviersaraja

😖 Oh my...some people definitely need medication or jail time if it doesn't work...or maybe both.
Be safe.
Oula mais y'a des gens qui s'ennuient sévÚrement la :blobthinkingeyes:

@oliviersaraja
Tout d'abord merci pour ce retour d'expérience et pour avoir tenu bon pendant ces nombreuses années.
Je dois avouer que j'ai été surpris d'apprendre qu'il y ait autant de modération à faire (menaces de mort, sérieux ?) pour un blog qui n'évoque pas vraiment des sujets polémiques.
Est-ce que connais globalement quels sont tes contenus ou prises de positions qui inciterait Ă  autant de haine de la part des rageux ?
@roipoussiere Merci. Oh, j'ai pas mal de pro NFT, les pro AI generative art (un peu), l'affaire Stallman aussi m'a envoyé une bonne vague de toxique dans le monde du FLOSS. Le CoC aussi. Oh, et le bisous lesbien dans Pepper&Carrot, cette case 'imposé aux enfants' n'a pas plu dans certains pays et parmis certaines communeauté. Aussi, je me moque souvent de Meta, Twitter, et les soutients inconditionels de Muskito ont souvent un bingo gagnant dans plusieurs catégories opposé à ma philosophie.
@Nath
Terrible de lire tout ça, tout mon soutien et merci/bravo de l'avoir partagé
@roipoussiere
@Nath
@TerryHancock Thanks! Yes, Mastodon is fine. I get sometime attacks here also, and hate things, but blocking/reporting can be done on the phone with a single click.

The blog required like an access to a sFTP to edit a PHP file to enter a custom array of IP address .... Oh my... I remember doing that this year in the middle of a tropical forest at Reunion, interrupting a short hike with my wife. Crazy...
Oh, wow... it's sad, but understandable why that is necessary.

I'll just move to commenting, congratulating and cheering you on here, then!

:blobcatheart: đŸ§™â€â™€ïž 🎹 đŸ–Œïž
@Moini Hey Moini! Yay, good to see you here!
I was following you on Twitter and when I moved here I decided to keep only your RSS, but now it's time to follow you back also here.
And my first comment/feedback is: good choice. Unfortunate, but good choice.
Keep up! đŸ––đŸ»
Je viens juste de lire, j'hallucine.
Tout mon soutien.
Ce monde me fait...
#soutine
Ça pue les chemises brunes, que je n'aime pas cette odeur.
Et tu vois, hasard ou pas, avant de te répondre, j'écoutais "Ma France' et 'Nuit et Brouillard' de Jean Ferrat.
Ceci Ă©tant, quand Ă  toi, ne lĂąche rien.
"Les chiens aboient, la caravene passe."
What a adorable little drawing.
I'm following you since a few months ago , but I totally understand your situation regarding spam and hate mail.
What I'm surprised is with the death threats... Then again the www as we know it is becoming more and more agressive.
Anyway do share your blog posts around here. đŸ’œđŸŽ©
@Jour Thank you 💜
Yes, more and more aggressive but on Mastodon less and less; they are excluded by moderation doing its amazing work at a federation level. It's building a bubble of good human interaction and that's nice. Twitter was a big driver of negative comments on my blog, IMO, and also obscure Fediverse instances when they could still federate with my account. I hope the coming days will be easier on this side. Thanks for following my art!
@Jour
honestly can't conceive of how broken someone has to be to send death threats to the creator of Pepper & Carrot, which is quite possibly the most wholesome thing on the entire internet

I'm sorry that happened to you
@fsnk :blobcatheart: Thank you for your kind words.
@tradjincal Merci. Oui, j'ai eu les mĂȘme conclusions aprĂšs quelques test (et aussi une bonne lecture lente et approfondi de https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ ).

A la fois, je commençais aussi à voir parmis tous les blog statique genre Hugo/Pelican la disparition des espaces commentaires sur site.
C'est vraiment triste que mĂȘme pour un artiste comme toi (dans les convictions que tu portes, et surtout dans le dessin, magnifique 💎) tu puisses te faire emmerder.

Se dire qu'Ă  cause d'idiots, tu dois te "censurer" dans tes interactions, c'est chiant.
Mais l'important, c'est ton bien ĂȘtre pour continuer Ă  proposer ce que tu souhaites.

Soutien incompressible @davidrevoy, parce que ton contenu, c'est vraiment stylĂ© (pour moi 😁)
C'est vraiment fou que des gens envoient de tels commentaires, je n'en reviens pas! Tout mon soutien!!!
je te comprends tellement... Perso j'ai pris cette décision il y a 8 ans et j'ai jamais regretté. Tellement plus de sérénité quand je publie un truc !
That is sad to hear, a hard but well understood decision. We give you a warm hug and heart from the both of us! Keep up your amazing art and comics.
That is really sad, but not surprising 🙁.

An alternative I am playing with (but I am very far from having your audience size) is to add a link "Discuss this article on Mastodon" at the end of my posts. With just a link (not inlined Mastodon comments), you give readers a place to comment but the moderation stays on Mastodon side.
Ah, I too, missed the part where you said your Mastodon instance deletes older comments đŸ€ŠđŸ»
@agateau Thanks. No problem and I just added a little '[1]' update: I got news from my instance, Framapiaf isn't removing automatically the comments after 30 days. I assumed it was like that because of a bias: 30 days ago they flushed accidentally it during an upgrade. it's not planned for it to happen again in the future.
So, maybe adding a masto ID in my admin panel and writing a link in the footer to invite to read comments is probably something I'll do.
@agateau If you plan to do that, here is the helpful link 😀 https://carlschwan.eu/2020/12/29/adding-comments-to-your-static-blog-with-mastodon/
@carlschwan @agateau It's what I did last week 🙂 (fully php, with a cache that catches the API json file once every 4h to not overload my instance with all my visitors and your code was inspiring, I had the bookmark open all the time during integration Carl 💜 (thanks for the recent update).
I abandoned it because I thought my instance was trashing all comments after 30 days.

Maybe I'll digg back in my git history to find it and reinstall it. It was like 100% ready: screenshots:
A screenshot of Mastodon on left, and the thread mirrored on my blog on right. I used my cat avatar.
A screenshot of the footer of the blog post with instruction about synchronisation of comments.
@agateau Once you find it back from your git history, I could probably mention your solution on my blog post since a few readers asked me for a php /server side solution
@carlschwan Right. I'll try to publish the core of the code on the post, an easy version without all the catavatar, integration to PluXML , etc... just a core. I'll take example from your blog post.

@agateau
@carlschwan Your article has been in the back of my mind as something to add to my blog since you wrote it 😀, but I recently reconsidered the idea because of moderation. I was worried about not being able to moderate content which would show directly on my site
@agateau That's a good point. With my cache of 4h, I made a mechanism in my admin panel of my blog where I could renew the cache immediately for a given article. This way, if a bad comment appears on Mastodon, I would have to moderate it from Masto, and if my blog caught it before I moderate it, I would have to connect to my admin panel and force refresh the article (or wait 4h for the next refresh). Doable with a smartphone. But more works than just linking directly on masto.

@carlschwan
That's reasonable and understandable, yet it's still a bit sad. At least we still have spaces like this one.
Je suis désolé d'apprendre ça, mais t'as eu raison. Priorité à la santé.
Courage Ă  toi.
If anything this will allow you to migrate to a static system eventually.
@jookia Hey Jookia! 👋 Yes, I think it is on the way.
Je me connecte trĂšs rarement Ă  mastodon, et aujourd'hui que j'y passe en coup de vent j'apprends la triste nouvelle, et ce alors que je n'ai commentĂ© que deux ou trois fois sur le blog 🙁 C'est dommage, mais assez comprĂ©hensible vu ce que tu dĂ©cris, le pire Ă©tant les menaces de morts pour un rien. T'es quelqu'un de super sympa et attentionnĂ©, t'as toujours rĂ©pondu Ă  mes questions quand je t'ai contactĂ© : ça m'attriste et enrage que tu ais dĂ» subir tout ça. 🙁 Hug de soutient.
@YudranArt Merci, c'est sympa ! Ca reste une petite minoritĂ©, mais une assez active pour que j'ai toujours la charge mentale que le blog pouvait ĂȘtre dĂ©gueulassĂ© Ă  tout moment. Du coup, j'emportait une machine partout avec moi, mĂȘme en vacance pour rĂ©agir vite. J'ai compris de passage Ă  Lyon au Framacamp en discutant que c'Ă©tait plus tenable. J'avais dĂ©jĂ  eu la tentation durant les Geekfaeries en dĂ©but Juin ou j'avais eu de la modo Ă  faire en plein festival...
Ça ne sera sĂ»rement pas suffisant pour contrebalancer toutes ces horreurs, mais tiens, prends ça :
:blobcatheart: :blobcatheart: :blobcatheart:

Et merci pour tout tes magnifiques dessins et BD 😍
Vraiment triste pour toi que tu doives en arriver lĂ .

Soutien et courage pour la suite, j'espĂšre que ces gens haineux prendront un jour conscience de leur bĂȘtise et du mal qu'ils font.
Désolé d'apprendre ça.
J'espÚre que ça va te libérer d'un poids mentalement et que tu pourras te sentir plus tranquille.
You make people smile and I am glad I found you - and Pepper and Carrot - here.

You need to look after yourself - so you are doing the right thing.

Be well ! And thank you.
Bon sang ! Mais qu'est devenu internet pour en arriver lĂ  ?

Je comprends ta décision et de soutiens dans ce sens.

Bon courage et surtout continue de nous ravir avec tes merveilleuses créations !
@BjoernJagnow Hey, thanks for pointing this: I think I used a bad word or false friend to get 'deposit'. In French: "DĂ©position" is very near to Deposit word, my brain made a shortcut. But Deposit in English is for money, I forgot about this. It should be "Make a statement to the police" or "a Report". I'll fix the article. Thanks!
@victorhck Thanks a lot for your encouragement!
Glad to be a follower here in the fediverse.

Thank you for the great work you do, and don't beat yourself up about cutting off the commenting system. Mean-spirited bozos are too much drain on a person to endure.

Bon chance!
@Algot Thank you / Merci! 🙂
je dirais "et merde! Encore un" 😞 Comme de nombreux autres bloggers (Timo, sebsauvage, Gee...) les espaces de commentaires disparaissent les 1 aprĂšs les autres. Je n'ai pas bien compris pourquoi tu ne parviens pas Ă  faire une copie des commentaires de masto. DĂ©porter les commentaires n'est pas une bonne idĂ©e ? Tu ne peux pas profiter de la modĂ©ration de l'instance que tu utilises ? En tous cas, tu as mon humble soutien et mes remerciements pour tout ce que tu partages
@jerry_wham Merci!

Pour les commentaires de Masto; j'ai eu plus d'infos aprĂšs la publication de mon article.
Il y a eu un accident de manip cÎté mon instance et les réponses à tous mes toots sont parties à la poubelle. Ne le savant pas, j'avais déduit à tord que le serveur mettait à la poubelle toutes réponses de plus d'un mois. Du coup j'avais abandonné mon code qui synchronisait mon blog et mon Masto. J'ai mis à jour une note dans l'article. Je vais reétudier ça.
That is sad.

I did have a blog that I eventually killed for a lot of reasons. It did have a commenting system on it, but I was never very popular, and I was able to keep the idiots at bay.

I've been writing on Medium and substack... and my presences is growing in the fediverse. I now have a Firefish instance, from which I post my thoughts into the fediverse. I've been thinking of opening up registrations, but I'm almost certainly going to require payment, to turn away the jackasses that would like to ruin everybody's experience.

It sucks when people can't behave.
@yourautisticlife All I know is FireFish is a renamed CalcKey. I know basically nothing about it other than that it exists and uses ActivityPub, so I couldn't tell you why it split from Misskey or why it changed its name. The official site doesn't shed any light either. Chris Trottier/Atomic Poet would know; I've seen him posting about it. But if he's publicly given the specific reasons, I either didn't see it (likely, as I don't follow him) or forgot (likely...I don't remember why).
@linebyline Thank you. I'm interested to know if it the project has a interesting ethic and values, and if they need a mascot đŸ˜ș

@yourautisticlife
Meet @atomicpoet. AFAIK, Firefish wasn't a split from MissKey, just a renamed CalcKey, but Chris can fill you in on the actuals. There's a logo, but a mascot by you is a great idea!

I adore your work, and discovered it here. Furthermore, I believe after you adjust, you'll find a big weight has been lifted from your shoulders. We will keep expressing our gratitude to you and adoration of your characters here. đŸ™âœŒïžâ€ïž

I recently started my blog without comments, so I'll never miss them.
@breitensteinart Thank you. Ha, I see another project CalcKey. I understand now why the renaming: I accidentally mixed up CalcKey and MissKey. It's probably to avoid that. I'll have a look at the project official website and repo.

@atomicpoet
kudos for holding out for so long. i feel like we have seen the decline of comment systems for a good long while now, with how increasingly more involved it becomes to manage one to a degree that you’re not opening yourself to legal problems, or just a completely bad time.
@gekitsu Thanks. Oh yes, you are right: the GDPR made also things a bit more complex from a legal point of view. I took this change for granted, but it was a work to add the ToS to my blog to explain how the post are stored, how they can be edited, how user can ask for deletion, etc..
âœŠđŸ»
C'est horrible ce qu'il t'arrive.
Courage, on est tous derriĂšre toi !
I'm saddened that it came down to that; you've gone through much of the same reasons I dropped comments from my system, from the trying to find a service to help, folks bypassing it, and trying to write my own.
2023 was the first year I had to make a deposit to the police for the many death threats I received.

That breaks my heart, not only that people continually make the threats because they don't ever suffer the consequences but also because you have to pay to deal with them because of frequency.
@dmoonfire Thanks for your nice words.

And sorry about my bad usage of the word "Deposit", it's because in French do a statement/report to the police is named "une DĂ©position". I fixed the article, police didn't asked me any money. But I spent time, a lot of time on making my dossier.
@BjoernJagnow Ah, so more closely related to (but still not the same as) "deposition" in English. Definition 4 at Wiktionary: "The process of taking sworn testimony out of court; the testimony so taken."

https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=deposition&oldid=75104636#English
@linebyline Yes, it looks like this "deposition" meaning is close, but exclusively in English for court/law language. Good to know.

Words that are close like that between my native language and English are painful. I do many mistakes of meaning because of them 😅
@BjoernJagnow
It takes so much more work and energy to to build up and to maintain than to destroy. It's a shame that a handful of cranks can ruin something good for so many. But that's certainly not your fault, and I fully support your decision. I'm just sad it came to that.
đŸ˜Č Yikes! It's terrible to have to put up with that. You've convinced me to never add a commenting system to anything I put online. But, seriously - thanks for sharing your wonderful talent and art work with the world.
In case this might help anyone, I use giscus (https://giscus.app). Works really well since my blog repo is hosted on GitHub and no self-hosting required. Commentors would at least need a GitHub account, so would mainly be a dev demographic. Can always lock people from creating GitHub Discussions or ban them if necessary. Absolutely no tolerance for non-constructive comments either; no one has any time for that.
i had comments in my blog too, it was pretty much always harassment or other unwanted crap. Removing the comment section and replacing it with a link to a mailing list made it more tolerable: if someone really wants to say something, they gotta send email that shows publicly to everyone. It's a big hurdle and thus keeps undesirables mostly away.
@aks Thanks for the tip of the mailing list. It's the first time I read this solution and I find it to be a good idea.
@Aks
My mastodon comments are displayed on my Hugo blog. But, I'm on my own mastodon instance...

I have to think about a way to display them in case my instance has to disappear at some point...
I'm sorry you are losing something that you find so valuable.

I personally continue to follow the Slashdot-era rule: "Never, ever read the comments." But I'm a visitor, not the owner seeking feedback.
DĂ©solĂ© que tu aies eu Ă  gĂ©rer toute cette Ă©nergie nĂ©gative. J'ai retirĂ© les commentaires de mon site aussi mais c'Ă©tait uniquement Ă  cause des spams. Dis-toi au moins que si quelqu'un prend du temps dans sa journĂ©e pour t'agacer alors que vous ne vous connaissez mĂȘme pas, c'est que tu as eu un effet sur sa vie mĂȘme si ce n'est pas positif. D'une certaine façon, c'est peut-ĂȘtre mieux que de crĂ©er et publier du contenu qui ne suscite aucune rĂ©action.
Triste, mais j'imagine que cela devait arriver : tu avais dĂ©jĂ  parlĂ© des spams et de la menace de mort (dans un article ou sur Masto, je ne sais plus), et j'imagine un peu la charge mentale technique que cela a dĂ» ĂȘtre pour coder des filtres antispam :/ La charge mentale Ă©motionnelle, elle, je ne l'imagine pas (soutien)
Understandable. Hope all nice people will still be in touch with you.
Sad, but understandable. Moderation is one of the challenges of our times and maybe something that can only work in communities where we can help each other.

FWIW, if you ever revisit this there's a thing called cactus comments which basically implements comments via the matrix chat protocol, so your comment section is like a matrix room (and AFAIK you can moderate it in a similar way to matrix rooms, so others could help you). https://cactus.chat/
@ctietze I did that almost twelve years ago, and have never looked back.
It’s a shame to see the end of this system, but I understand why. It’s a shame that I won’t be able to read the comments after every blog post anymore, which is something that I found almost as interesting as the posts themselves. Maybe you could implement links to the posts you made on your socials where people can comment at the bottom of the blog posts, but I can understand why you wouldn’t.
I'm sorry to hear that, though I think people have found using WebMentions and/or federated responses to be a pretty sufficient alternative.
@jtr Hey, thank you.For real reasons, no idea. I don't think my involvement in Free Libre and Open Source for more than a decade is part of it. My blog post against NFT, maybe.Same for my article explaining why I'll not use generative AI images, and what I think of AI artists. But these are assumptions,I never got a clear feedback about the reasons from the haters.It's random. I'm just visible and at one point I attract also this tiny percentage of toxic behavior. It's probably just a statistic.
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