Post

What say you?

Adding a comment system by utterances

Free speech enhanced

There is no point in writing online if your readers cannot provide feedback for your writings. You might as well be shouting at a void. My ideal commenting system has to be free, open source and should not be a hassle to setup. Luckily, utterances 🔮 checks all of these conditions

It is a lightweight comments widget built on GitHub issues. Use GitHub issues for blog comments, wiki pages and more! The notable features are:

  • Open source. 🙌
  • No tracking, no ads, always free. 📡🚫
  • No lock-in. All data stored in GitHub issues. 🔓
  • Styled with Primer, the css toolkit that powers GitHub. 💅
  • Dark theme. 🌘
  • Lightweight. Vanilla TypeScript. No font downloads, JavaScript frameworks or polyfills for evergreen browsers. 🐦🌲

How it works

When Utterances loads, the GitHub issue search API is used to find the issue associated with the page based on url, pathname or title. If it cannot find an issue that matches the page, utterances-bot will automatically create an issue the first time someone comments.

To comment, users must authorize the utterances app to post on their behalf using the GitHub OAuth flow. Alternatively, users can comment on the GitHub issue directly.

Setting up Utterances

Repository

Choose the repository utterances will connect to.

Make sure the repo is public, otherwise your readers will not be able to view the issues/comments. Make sure the utterances app is installed on the repo, otherwise users will not be able to post comments. If your repo is a fork, navigate to its settings tab and confirm the issues feature is turned on.

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repo:
    username/repo

A public GitHub repository. This is where the blog post issues and issue-comments will be posted.

Theme

Choose an Utterances theme that matches your blog.

Enable Utterances

Add the following script tag to your blog’s template. Position it where you want the comments to appear. Customize the layout using the .utterances and .utterances-frame selectors.

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<script
  src="https://utteranc.es/client.js"
  repo="[ENTER REPO HERE]"
  issue-term="title"
  theme="gruvbox-dark"
  crossorigin="anonymous"
  async
></script>

The complete documentation can be found at https://utteranc.es

This post is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by the author.