A Disqus alternative https://posativ.org/isso/

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README.md

Unescape Escape

Isso – Ich schrei sonst

You love static blog generators (especially Acrylamid cough) and the only option to interact with your community is Disqus. There's nothing wrong with it, but if you care about the privacy of your audience you are better off with a comment system that is under your control. This is, where Isso comes into play.

Try Yourself!

Features

CRUD comments written in Markdown
SQLite backend, Disqus import
client-side JS (currently 54kb minified, 18kb gzipped)
I18N, available in german and english (also fallback)

Installation

Python 2.6, 2.7 or 3.3
a working C compiler

Install Isso with:

~> pip install isso

Set your database location and website:

~> cat my.cfg
[general]
dbpath = /var/lib/isso/comments.db
host = http://example.tld/

Optional: you can import your comments from Disqus.com:

~> isso -c my.cfg import ~/Downloads/user-2013-09-02T11_39_22.971478-all.xml
[100%]  53 threads, 192 comments

Now start the server:

~> isso -c my.cfg run
2013-10-30 09:32:48,369 WARNING: unable to connect to SMTP server
2013-10-30 09:32:48,408 INFO: connected to HTTP server

Make sure, Isso can connect to the server that hosts your blog, otherwise you are not able to post comments.

Website Integration

You can run Isso on a dedicated domain or behind a sub URI like /isso. It makes actually no difference except for the webserver configuration (see below).

Whatever method you prefer (just change the URL), to embed comments add

<script src="http://example.tld/js/embed.min.js"></script>

to your HTML (presumedly into <head>) and

<div id="isso-thread"></div>

below your post. That's all. The JavaScript client will automatically detect the API endpoint.

To show the comment count for posts (but no comments), add

<script src="http://example.tld/js/count.min.js"></script>

to your header and all links ending with #isso-thread are updated with the current comment count.

This functionality is already included when you embed embed.min.js, do not mix embed.min.js and count.min.js in a single document.

Client Configuration

You can configure the client (the JS part) via data- attributes:

data-title

When you start a new thread (= first comment on a page), Isso sends a GET request that page to see if it a) exists and b) parse the site's heading (currently used as subject in emails).

Isso assumes that the title is inside an h1 tag near the isso thread:
```
<html>
    <body>
        <h1>Website Title</h1>
        <article>
            <header>
                <h1>Post Title</h1>
            <section id="isso-thread">
        ...
```
In this example, the detected title is Post Title as expected, but some older sites may only use a single h1 as their website's maintitle, and a h2 for the post title. Unfortunately this is unambiguous and you have to tell Isso what's the actual post title:
```
<section data-title="Post Title" id="isso-thread">
```
Make sure to escape the attribute value.
data-isso

Isso usually detects the REST API automatically, but when you serve the JS script on a different location, this may fail. Use data-isso to override the API location:
```
<script data-isso="/isso" src="/path/to/embed.min.js"></script>
```

Webserver configuration

nginx configuration to run Isso on /isso:

server {
    listen       [::]:80;
    listen       [::]:443 ssl;
    server_name  example.tld;
    root         /var/www/example.tld;

    location /isso {
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header X-Script-Name /isso;
        proxy_pass http://localhost:8080;
    }
}

nginx configuration to run Isso on a dedicated domain:

server {
    listen       [::]:8080;
    server_name  comments.example.tld;

    location / {
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_pass http://localhost:8080;
    }
}

Documentation

Alternatives

talkatv – Python
Juvia – Ruby on Rails
Tildehash.com – PHP
SO: Unobtrusive, self-hosted comments

README.md Unescape Escape