Responding to Comments

Using Ghost
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I’ve read the other posts on this…Ghost is amazing and I love it.

Why is there no place in the admin dashboard to see new comments and engage with them as the author? This seems doable and simple, yes?

I have to go to my email, make sure I don’t miss a notification about a comment, go to the page as a front end signed in member, and then engage with one comment at a time in each post.

I just read and understand the open source nature of Ghost, it was so well made I legitimately didn’t even know it was open source project until I encountered the issue. My hats off to you all.

Can we talk about this? I have no code skills, but what would this feature take?

My ideal scenario is this:

  • I would get notifications about comments in an engagement section in the dashboard
  • I would be able to get to them / mark them off as I go / respond to them right there without going to the post - any of those 3
  • I would NOT have to login to the front end as a user, it should be just my author account responding as me as the author

For the record, I’m frustrated with Gravitar just generally, cause I want to use different profile pictures different places. Anyone have any ideas here? Just delete Gravitar? Idk what to do.

3 Likes
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Good idea. I also was surprised, when I didn’t find any sections in admin panel about comments.

Maybe it was made specially, because we can make comment integrations like disqus, or similar services. I never used it and don’t want to use it, cause this service provides codes with ads and some trackers that I don’t want on my website.

Native comments with notifications, would be great…

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As someone contemplating the switch from WordPress to Ghost I would really love this feature. I tend to get quite a lot of comments on my blog and I am used to responding to them through the WP backend.

Having this feature in the Ghost admin panel would be awesome

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I’m stick with Discourse embed comments because of that, they are open-source too and very responsive to their community needs.

I hope you can found a way to work this out :slight_smile:

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I used a third-party commenting system (FastComments) which has a moderation interface and works well. Inexpensive ($1-2/month for the volume of comments I’ve got/receive).

One thing that’s notable is that my switch from WP to Ghost resulted in a 90% drop in comment volume … readers get the newsletter and read that via an email client, rather than using a web browser. Subscriber numbers, paying and free, are healthy and increasing, so it’s not that I’m just writing less engaging material :wink:

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I came across this complaint / feature request / how-to when I was searching for exactly this function.

Amazing that this function isn’t here, but one thing that may help:

  • Using the Fediverse feature in the Home part (once activated) to reply to comments with the main @index@website.com account.

However(!), this won’t work for me as one of my posts did not go to this. So, all but one. Embarrassingly, one post was just test and that went up. I deleted it, but the legitimate post never appeared. And I have no way that I have found to post to the Fediverse a Ghost post that already went up before I activated the Fediverse integration.

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Hey @Jonathan_J_Chiarella ,

However(!), this won’t work for me as one of my posts did not go to this. So, all but one. Embarrassingly, one post was just test and that went up. I deleted it, but the legitimate post never appeared. And I have no way that I have found to post to the Fediverse a Ghost post that already went up before I activated the Fediverse integration.

Let me see if I can help with your problem:
Posts only show up in the Fediverse if they’re publicly available. Is the missing post perhaps marked members-only or similar? I’d make sure it’s marked for public access, then unpublish and republish, that should make it appear.

For older posts, if you unpublish and republish, that should trigger them going out to the fediverse.

Now, back to the thread topic, which is responding to comments on posts:

  • Using the Fediverse feature in the Home part (once activated) to reply to comments with the main @index@website.com account.

This suggestion doesn’t currently make sense. Unless something has changed in the last week or so, fediverse replies don’t appear on posts. One certainly could ditch Ghost’s native comments in favor of linking to the post in the fediverse, but the problem with the whole federated thing is that there’s not /one/ place that a website reader might be directed to. You can’t really link to a post in the fediverse like you’d like to a facebook post.

==== Reminder: I don’t work for Ghost (although that would be awesome). The venting that follows is my own. ====

To the several folks complaining about lack of functionality in the comments function: If you’re paying for Ghost Pro, you should absolutely let them know (via their support email) that you want that functionality.

If you’re using Ghost for free because it’s open source, then you might consider either doing the work to improve the comments package, or funding a developer to do the work to improve the comments package.

As someone who has put a lot of free labor (and code!) into Ghost, and who makes a living selling my services as a developer (on Ghost, themes, and integrations), I feel frustrated when the tone shifts from “this would be really helpful for us” to “why doesn’t this exist already? it should be easy!” It feels like complaining without contributing, and that’s a bad look.

==== Venting over. ====

There are several spots (comments moderation, post scheduling calendar, newsletter digests, image management) where I’d love to build an integration that solved the problem, but my experience with offering social sign-in is that the market is pretty small, and most people complaining about missing functionality don’t actually want to pay for access to it, so there’s not money to be made there. Will I eventually build one or more of these things anyway, because I love building stuff? Quite possibly, but I’ve got paying work to do first.

And on that note… have a great Sunday, ya’ll.

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Good thinking, but it was public and still is. To make new posts, I copy over old posts and then modify bits and then publish. This ensures that various settings and tags get carried over—i.e., I cannot forget.

I wonder if that workflow is responsible for something not appearing.

I was thinking of a sensible place for this feature (a centralized place for a site admin to make replies from). Just an idea. It is not helpful to anyone now. It was an idea for where to centralize things. I am tepid to endorse that idea at the moment precisely because of compatibility problems that I encountered.

I am in a funny spot. I pay for hosting through another service, Magic Pages, but the runner of that service seems active in the Ghost universe of development and spreading the word. Also, a portion of the hosting fees I pay go to Ghost developers (according to a post on Magic Pages). I see the lack of the centralized replying part as a major hurdle to adoption of Ghost. In order to get Ghost to compete with WordPress ad well as steal the newsletter thunder from Substack, Ghost software needs to get people to switch to it. That’s just how I see it.

The centralized commenting is less of “I want this” and more of “I had expected it would already exist—isn’t this a feature that every blogger obsessed over?”

Add-on note: I took your advice and unpublished then published a post.

It did appear on the timeline etc., but with the original publishing date. It also triggered something where the Home panel acted as if I had never used it before. I got the intro/tutorial images. Then, once in, all my info and profile photos were still there, and the missing post now appeared, but backdated. I tried this with other posts I made before activating the ActivityPub part. One of them appeared (and was backdated). The other did not. I will try again . . .

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Interesting! If it’s reproducible, please file a bug, because I know the Activity Pub team is actively squashing bugs.

@jannis is awesome. He’s actually my biggest Github sponsor, so clearly I’m biased, but I’d have nothing but nice things to say even if he weren’t. And you’ll see him here all the time helping people out. He’s a good community member, and gives back to the Ghost ecosystem, no doubt.

I don’t disagree with you - comments moderation seems to me like it would be a really valuable feature for sites that use comments. I’m assuming that the Ghost team hasn’t built it yet because they’ve decided that other things are a higher value for the time. [A lot of Ghost publishers aren’t interested in having comments, so this feature would not have any value for them.] The dev team doesn’t have unlimited resources – they’re entirely bootstrapped by Ghost Pro hosting fees. Anyway, I don’t want to end up sounding like I’m speaking for the Ghost team (because I’m not), but I think there’s a certain tone in this thread that feels more critical than helpful.

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That confuses me a bit to hear. I think the high-water mark of commenting everywhere was the early 2010s, and since then newspapers have especially seen these as more trouble than they’re worth, upvote nonsense, disinformation, etc. However, it seemed that independent journalists and others thought the comments were worth it, as was most social media engagement.

But considering how Ghost publishers lean to being against Substack and the most nefarious consequences of social media, it really should not surprise me that commenting is not a priority. WordPress probably got on this early, as did other programs and platforms, because of having a lot of money in the early 2010s, before the blowback.

Or maybe I am just getting old and out of touch.

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that’s interesting on the changes in user behavior and sub numbers, cool to hear in a way.
also really helpful for the shout to the cheaper comment solution, ty

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The common behavior is to make a waitlist, show something, paywall it and sell it via third party plugins.

You probably want to check Hashnode and/or Strapi/Directus.