TL;DR: Get Utterances, it’s awesome.

When I started this blog, I wanted an easy way for my readers to share their thoughts on the blog and the articles I write, as well as interacting with me. I started by installing Disqus onto the blog, and this seemed to work well. That was until I realised about the ads. As I was on the free plan, Disqus was showing tonnes of ads to my readers, which interfered with the commenting and reading experience. There were also numerous other issues for me.

Because of this, I moved to Hyvor Talk. At first, this seemed like a great alternative to Discord, with an even nicer UI. That was until I realised I was on the free trial of the service - which was actually paid. When the free trial came to an end, potential commenters were greeted with an old-fashioned widget informing them that commenting was temporarily unavailable. This probably put users off coming back later to comment.

Today, I have changed my commenting system again. This time, it’s Utterances, a simple and clean system based around GitHub Issues. You’ll need a GitHub account to use the new system, but hopefully it should make commenting easier and more user-friendly. You’ll also have to authorise Utterances to access your account, but their code is open - https://github.com/utterance/utterances/. You can also check their privacy policy - https://github.com/utterance/utterances/blob/master/PRIVACY-POLICY.md.

Why not try commenting with the new system? You can even react to other people’s messages!