Native comments system

The quote above was posted over a year ago, but the comment still ring true. You can read up on our approach to adding features over on our FAQ. There are plenty of services and tools out there that focus on providing comments and methods of interacting with your community, some of which we have on our site. We’ve also recently added a guide on how to add comments to an existing Ghost site.

If you’re looking for something that’s fast loading and more integrated with your site then there’s always the JAMstack approach. Using Ghost as a headless CMS you can combine it with services like Staticman in a seamless static site.

Rest assured we are reading all your comments and listening to your feedback, but we believe there are a lot of options out there that are already doing a great job :slight_smile:

5 Likes

I agree with the above comments that comment functionality should probably be provided via a tight integration and native support for a specific plugin as opposed to being built into core. However, that leaves the question of which commenting plugin Ghost should select to provide native support for. The way I see it is this:

  1. The options discussed above are ‘open’ and in line with Ghost’s core values, but are often a) less powerful b) may not have a secure development future
  2. Options like Disqus suck for obvious reasons

I’m surprised no one has discussed the option of providing native support for Coral Talk yet. Coral was created by Mozilla and recently acquired by Vox Media who have maintained its open source license (and who state will keep it open source in future), and has strong adoption in a lot of enterprise publishers. Seems like a nice middle ground between the considerations discussed in 1) and 2), i.e. the balancing act between ‘power’ and continued development.

Of course, if this option is to be explored, Ghost will have to speed up moving to Node12 as ‘recommended support’ from v10, as Coral only supports Node12 and above.

@John thoughts?

Integrations ALWAYS end wrong, this is why the core components must be made in house.

Before Ghost get focus on those who makes money with their content, there was no reason to consider the comments as core, at least other than be comparison with WordPress that has it for being a true Blog (Ghost is not a blog but a simple CMS).

But now, Ghost have to consider:

  1. Creators ARE NOT web developers, they want a solution in a simple point, they will not integrate or want to learn other product than that used to post their content, as WordPress does.

  2. It is required a reliable service with Ghost control of the main features, lets thing I am a publisher/entrepreneur with not IT support and I hire Ghost, then my content gets broken because of a Discuss failure or a Coral Talk upgrade, he contacts them and they tell it is Ghost, so he goes to Ghost to realise the problem is not there while he is loosing money and getting complains with every minute his website is not as his members expect (I have seen this thousand of times).

It is clear Ghost team does not want to make the comment system, using the excuse that it will affect the performance. I suggest them to do not be afraid, the members module was a great idea, but it came with a cost so face it, I think you have can make it well.

It’s the other way around: WordPress is an overly complicated CMS, which can be a blog. Ghost is a blog, but it has no interest in being a complicated CMS.

4 Likes

Well a Blog is a CMS because both are used to post, but to be a Blog you need a comment system in your core. WordPress is a Blog but its plugins made it complicated, the same happens with Ghost, which is complicated because it depends of integrations, just like WP depends of plugins.

For this reason Ghost(Pro) must include the most important features in its core, (to avoid the problems with plugins/integrations) as it does with the member module, and if it wants to honestly be compared with WordPress, it needs to be a Blog and include the comment system in the core too.

I know Ghost team decided to do not develop the comment system and they choose the performance excuse to justify the decision , but this is technically and practically false. I guess it would be more honest to tell they do not have the skills to make it, I am sure there will be a lot of volunteers to help, or simply tell they do not want to, letting the users to choose a better solution for their needs.

We always listen to the community, however we would appreciate it if you used Ghost for a little longer before providing feedback :slight_smile:. However you’re right, people should use the best tool for their needs. Ghost is more of a precision tool, not a Swiss Army knife.

2 Likes

What is the point to post in here that I am new in Ghost 3.0? How does it contribute to the “Native comments system” module? I will tell you, when someone does not like the true, when his thoughts do not match with the facts, he tries to discredit the person who brings them to the conversation.

However, nobody needs even to use Ghost to understand:

  1. It is not a Blog. Your features list shows this.
  2. It is complex because it depends of integrations. Your home page have this.
  3. You do not want to include the Comment System . You comment this.

Even with all the time you have used Ghost, you do not realise:

  1. It is not a precision tool any more. Ghost(Pro) is a tool to make money (I invite you to use the calculator in the web page) and you must provide the tools for this.
  2. You choose to enter in mayor leagues, you are not a nice and simple CMS. You are comparing yourself not only with WordPress but with Patreon, both leaders of the market.
  3. Including the comment system in the core, does not make Ghost a Swiss Army Knife, this just makes Ghost a Blog…

While I always appreciate new features, I think detouring into native comments would be disastrous for Ghost and, by extension, the community. As others have mentioned, comments represent a whole different product with its own technical overhead. It’s the simple comparative advantage that comes with specialization.

It’s especially unnecessary, since there are several other comment plug-ins available, both external as a simple plugin (like Disqus) and self-hosted, like Discourse.

Since it sounds like you are interested in a self-hosted solution, I HIGHLY recommend Discourse. It’s actually what this very forum uses. They are a prime example of an active development community and they are thriving.

To enable comments in your posts, you simply drop in a small section of JavaScript into the post.hbs template, which Discourse guides you through. It has the added bonus that new posts are automatically added as a new thread in your Discourse discussion board. For users who sign up, they can also receive email digests which can then serve to notify them of new blog posts. In this way, Discourse can actually become its own subscription management system. And you gain a discussion forum to boot! It’s fantastic.

Discourse also supports integration with SSO providers such as Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc., so signing up is extremely easy for users. It also supports anti-spam plugins.

If you want to see a working example, here is a recent post from my own blog: Securing Your Network: Configuring ACLs on an HP 1910 Managed Switch “The Easy Way” and the forum that it bootstraps off.

If you’d be interested in a guide/tutorial setting up Discourse, let me know.

-TorqueWrench

2 Likes

As you kindly explain, Discourse is a forum (this is also in their home page), Discourse is not a comments system..

Indeed there are real Blogs around, also good comments systems, or professional FMS with fully featured Blog modules or fully featured membership systems, but it is not the case to mention them because here the point is to improve Ghost by including a native comment system in it.

I think a more constructive question would be,

“What features and additional value do you think the Ghost team could add that would make their homegrown comments module superior to the already widely-used and widely-available third-party comments providers?”

Coming from the development perspective (not Ghost), R&D is all about prioritization, and the smaller you are, the smarter you have to be about that prioritization. The dozens, if not hundreds of man-hours spent on development for such a module, represents a huge opportunity cost that could have been spent elsewhere. What additional advantage would you expect out of a comments module, directly from Ghost, compared to entire corporations (like Disqus) who have dozens of developers dedicated to this one task?

Determining the real, underlying request is what’s needed here. Is there some problem that users are having with integrating a third-party comments provider? If so, what is it? We may be able to help there. (“We” as in the Community, not volunteering Ghost R&D for anything :grinning:).

-TorqueWrench

6 Likes

I think what @DavidDarnes is getting at, is that you’ve posted on a few different threads here asking for features that aren’t part of Ghost (and may never be). So it begs the question: is Ghost the best fit for the requirements of your website? If you use it for a while and feel those missing features aren’t important, then that’s great.

However, if you feel your site is instead lacking, then Ghost may not be the best tool for the job. That’s OK too. There’s no point trying to put a square peg in a round hole, as the saying goes.

I personally came across Ghost around the same time I was launching my last project. I was very keen to make it work, but it quickly appeared to me that those missing features would be an issue for what I was trying to achieve. So I used WordPress instead. But with my latest project, it was clear Ghost was a good fit, so I used that instead.

Not every tool/app/framework/etc will be suitable for every task 100% of the time. And that’s OK. :pray:t2:

5 Likes

I understand what you say, but the subject of the post is “Native comments system”. We (those who consider this as a good feature in Ghost), are providing the facts to support such feature.

It is fine to know that you are able to manage Ghost and WordPress and I am sure many in here are able to implement other more complex solutions, but, accordingly to the forum guidelines, his comment as well as yours are not in the right place.

Lets think binary, Ghost team wants to make a comment system: 0 (no).

Do you see how easy is. This is more honest that attract the users who think some day it will be there, as those who expected to see it in version 3.0.

Also stop telling such will decrease Ghost performance, I am sure here are many developers with plenty years of experience knowing it is false.

Simply stop comparing Ghost with WordPress because they are not the same thing. Ghost should be compared with other CMS to avoid bad surprises from the “publishers” and “entrepreneurs”.

It would be great Ghost team to stop laying to the people or build a comment system :smile:

How so?

Yes, this is a thread of community members asking for comments to be implemented in core. There’s some arguments for and against. Regardless, as has been pointed out, there’s already a number of alternative third-party options you can use today. Even if Ghost were to commit to doing this, they’re a tiny team of 16 people and it would take a long time to deliver – properly. You’re either stuck waiting for an unknown period of time without comments in the hope the feature will ship, or using one of the existing integrations, or using another platform.

It’s true that WordPress has comments in core. They’re also a multinational corporation with thousands of staff. Their ability to deliver features in X days is not comparable.

Feature prioritisation is alluded to in this thread:

The FAQ explicitly does say they’re not supported. I don’t see how reading that, you would assume this feature exists, so there shouldn’t be any bad surprises.

https://ghost.org/faq/migrating-from-wordpress-to-ghost/

There is no need to call people liars. Nobody from the Ghost team made an explicit promise to deliver comments in core, and the rest of us are just ordinary users like yourself.

13 Likes

Thanks for the thoughtful response @StuartMorrisAU - very well put :slight_smile:

We’re aware that some people are very passionate about comments, though it’s rather ironic when the people who want comments most behave in a manner which illustrates the reason for why many sites don’t want them.

Everyone is very welcome to continue to vote on this topic to show their support, but I think we’ll close the discussion here. Everyone has had lots of time to make their points, and we’ll certainly take the feedback on board as we prioritise our roadmap.

11 Likes

Actually, I think now we need native comments system for Ghost. Once I asked a lot of my friends, “why are you choosing WordPress over Ghost, Ghost is a powerful platform.” they told me the only reason is Ghost doesn’t have a comment and react system, we have to pay or host a comment system.

1 Like

Agree - there doesn’t seem to be any good commenting system to integrate with ghost.

Cove.chat has the best integration given the users carry over, but it lacks a lot of features and seems way too bare bones.

A big thing Ghost can do to increase blog engagement would be to integrate comments and let users hit a button in the newsletter that takes them to the website’s comment box on that particular post

1 Like

We have great potential with Discourse, if there was seamless integration - SSO or otherwise.
Would love to see an improvement to the integration

2 Likes

Hi all, I agree having native comments on Ghost could be beneficial for some sites.

However, most WP sites don’t use native comments. Instead, they use plugins. And those plugins are either paid or a privacy nightmare. So, the argument isn’t fair on why someone would pick WP over Ghost because of it.

And another thing to consider is most articles don’t have any comments. Heck, most sites only get spam comments.

So, I’m not sure comments are one thing to be on top of the list for developing next for Ghost.

Those are my 2 cents.

Edit: This was already proposed and discussed here: Native comments system - #32 by And So go vote there if you want comments

1 Like

Today we shipped native comments for Ghost, now available to everyone:

All the things that @StuartMorrisAU mentioned previously in this thread still hold true. The main thing that’s changed in the last few years is that the full-time Ghost team is now 30+ people, so we have more ability to work on large/complex features and deliver them to a high standard.

This has been a long awaited feature for lots of you, and we appreciate your patience while we took the time to do it justice.

For more context and details about how (and why) we’re launching comments, now, check out the post above :)

12 Likes