Just seen the announcement for 3.0 but could find a definitive answer: does Ghost have commenting on posts built in from v3?
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You should probably verify this, but I don’t think Ghost 3.0 supports built-in comments.
The original idea thread about Membership & Subscriptions did mention adding a built-in commenting system. Not sure what the status of that is, but if “no built-in commenting” is still a deal-breaker, you might still get it in the next release or two 
Ghost does support adding in other comment platforms like Discourse or Commento—but I’m guessing from your earlier post that you know the options and found them unsatisfactory? Is there any specific reason you want built-in comments?
Hi, thanks for the info. I believe comments are one of the most valuable parts of my blog. I don’t know why anyone would want to give that content away.
Discussion on a topic often informs as much as the original posts and I want to ensure that is kept alongside the original content.
Here’s a concrete example; a post on my site about CSS Shapes.
https://benfrain.com/the-frustrations-of-using-css-shapes-and-css-exclusions/
Take a look at the comments — the specification authors took the time to add detailed information about how the specification was developed and why things are the way they are. Absolutely invaluable if this is a subject of interest.
Why would I want the content stored in one place and the comments somewhere else with a service I have no guarantee will still be here in the next 12 months?
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Hey @benfrain. It’s great that you’ve built up a strong community that are keen to chat about your writing work. However not everyone needs a commenting system built into their blog and we do our best to keep Ghost as lean as possible, which is why we recommend using other platforms to add commenting to blogs. There’s plenty of options to choose from:
https://ghost.org/integrations/community/
There’s also a good discussion going on here that you might want to check out: Native comments system - #6 by toddbirchard
Why would I want the content stored in one place and the comments somewhere else with a service I have no guarantee will still be here in the next 12 months?
I agree - and also services like Disqus often perform poorly and have questionable practices re: e.g. link hijacking, etc.
But there are quite a few self-hosted options which are pretty good. I tried Schnack for a bit, but I now use Isso, which I prefer for various reasons.
Self-hosting means your comments stay on your server for as long as you can be bothered to keep the service going… 
I agree with the rest of the comments, the free alternatives for people like me using Ghost Pro is not that great.
Disqus has long loading times and hijacks your page, and you don’t get to store the data yourself.
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I’m in the same bandwagon with (I bet many) other Ghost users who think it would be an absolute stellar thing to have native commenting in Ghost.
I do understand the reasoning why this hasn’t been baked in into Ghost (yet). I’m all for keeping the software clean and bloating Ghost with too many features is definitely a big no no. And yes, it is a big feature, that’s why there are so many separate businesses who do just this (commenting solutions). However, if built right, I don’t think the feature would convolute or make performance worse for the core product. It would also be an optin feature, not everyone would have to enable it.
Back in the good days (yeah, I’m a 
) of blogging (when people still had commenting enabled on their blogs), commenting was one of the absolute best part of the blogs. Insanely valuable and the community feel was great. Also, I had a few online courses back in the day which were build on WordPress with WP’s native commenting system enabled. The commenting was super useful for the course participants, because they could ask more about each lesson, have conversations with other members in the course and so forth. Super valuable.
I’ve tried several third party commenting solutions since (Discus, Commento, Isso and many more), but quite frankly, none of them come even near to the user experience that WordPress has still today with the builtin commenting. That is the sad reality, at least in my humble opinion.
I’ve mentioned my love for the native commenting feature quite often already in these forums, so I’ll just leave it here. But maybe for 4.0, this would be made reality? I sure hope so! 
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Throwing in my opinion: I’m a fan of comments too (people just don’t seem to do it as often as they used to!). More on that below.
On the other hand, I like Ghost’s minimalism because it’s what makes things flexible. I can use the Ghost admin to enter posts, or write my own frontend, or use the API to push data from elsewhere. Similarly, I can use Ghost’s templating engine, but I can also pull the data into a static-site generator and deploy that separately.
From what I hear, comment managing is more complicated these days than it used to be. We need to have spam handlers, ranking, moderation, and more. If Ghost has a tightly integrated system, it would make it that much harder to easily pull and push data from elsewhere.
But how about this: a simple “comments” table in the database, and a corresponding API which does nothing except add, remove and update comments. No moderation, no special logic, no nothing. It’s just an empty slot to store the data.
Then we could have an “official Ghost Comments frontend”, which would be exactly like Commento, the difference being that instead of storing data on its own servers it does it through the Comments API. This would handle all the messy stuff of filtering and moderation. People could integrate it into their JAMstack or wherever else they want by just inserting a few lines like for Disqus, but those who are so inclined can write a custom comment frontend themselves.
I’m guessing this is what Ghost will end up having eventually, integrating with Memberships or something and staying decoupled as it usually is. But…what if Ghost let out the storage backend and API right away?
Comments could be an experimental backend feature that’s only available via API, supporting the usual get/put/delete commands. Let the community develop the rest, so Ghost doesn’t have to invest too much effort themselves (until they’re ready). Locally-stored comments could happen sooner, for those who’re desperate, and Ghost can roll out their own officially-backed frontend flavour later when they’re ready. Win-win situation for all?
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I’ve been struggling with this as well. I have gone between Disqus, Commento, Talkyard, Muut, and Isso, and still don’t have one that is my 100% favorite. Lately I’ve been using Commento and Talkyard because of how simple and privacy focused they are.
My favorite right now is Talkyard as it also has a Discourse-style forum attached where additional discussions can happen. Commento is what @John is using on Rediverge, his new membership focused site. I love how simple and fast it is, but the developer is very slow to respond to issues or questions, and it seems like only one person, so there are always concerns about longevity.
Disqus was the standard for a long time, but they are in the business to make money off of your comments and people involved, and that bothers me. In particular, serving ads and other things does not match what I want with my site/brand. I also found a bunch of comments that had been flagged as potentially spam, which were completely legitimate comments by users, and were never posted.
I would love if Ghost would tackle this problem, but it does seem like a controversial one to solve…
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I agree full-heartedly with @badrihippo. Meanwhile, I’ve been using Utterances, and recently switched to Commento, which I self-host for free. It supports anonymous comments, has a modern interface, and works well for my blog.
I wrote a straightforward guide to set up Commento here, if anyone wants to check it out.
Talkyard is also nice, though it’s overkill for my case. Fingers crossed for 4.0!
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For me absence of comments is very surprising as well. In the past I had experience with Blogger which sucks with design & usability, but it works, you can write posts and it has comments. On the other hand, I have experience with static site generators. They completely work for me as well, the publishing UX is not as pleasant as Ghost, but hey, you don’t bother with hosting and you don’t have to pay for it (if you go with GH Pages for example).
The problem for me with static generators was about comments. That’s why I looked into Ghost, because it’s a self-hosted blogging platform not implemented in PHP. And as I run a server with a dedicated database, I’m really surprised that there is no support for comments.
Personally for me I would be super happy if there is a feature in the “labs” section to enable trivial comments. I think that it would be useful for Ghost community to see if there is a real interest in comments
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What I believe would be awesome to have (in additions to the many other good ideas in this thread) is to have the ability to allow:
- “paid” members to write comments (allowing free members to read comments) → this is possible in for instance Substack
- maybe allow only paid members to both write and read comments
Which leads me also to an unrelated point:
- Allowing “paid” members access to a post “archive” can be a great selling point to help conversion between free and paid members. → possible in Substack
→ This allows for such a view: Archive - On Substack
Please note the discussions tab… value on its own as a “topical” discussion forum
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Hello, I guess we need to clarify some terms to improve the conversation.
To be a Blog it is required a comments systems, WordPress is a blog. Ghost is not a Blog, it is simple CMS, made to manage posts.
The confusion comes because you compare Ghost with WordPress. If this is really your goal, you need to make Ghost to behave as a Blog, adding to its core comments, trakbacks, pingbacks and statistics.
Another source of confusion is when you tell Ghost is " Fast. Open. Simple. Secure." because there is not a thing more Slow, Close, Complex and Insecure than manage one provider for each additional feature.
In the past, this misunderstandings did not matter, but now that you are focusing in those professionals who make money with their content, you need to provide them the tools that they need. Now it is not important the technical approach.
WordPress is not bloatware because of its comments system, which is in its core, but because it became into a bad modular CMS, so, there is no reason to think this will happen to Ghost after getting the Blog functionalities unless your code is bad made. In fact, if you need so much integrations you are as bloatware, because the pages will be slow and unpredictable, as many people is complaining with Disqus.
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What is the % for and against?
This should be a native feature that can easily be switched on and off. That way you please both crowds.
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I have no idea, but if you look at the forum you’ll see that it’s not requested that often. People more often implement an existing service
Isn’t that a bit self fulfilling though? If it’s not there, people just go elsewhere or implement a 3rd party version. I’d expect it’s a smaller sub-section that actually post a comment about it.
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