local comments

This article is a stub. You can help the IndieWeb wiki by expanding it.

local comments are comments (sometimes called native comments) that are made directly (locally) on a post (like an article) in the UI of the site serving it, instead of posting a reply post on an indieweb site and sending a webmention.

IndieWeb Examples

Known

Known (optionally) supports local comments using almost the same mechanism as comments received by webmentions. A local comment is given its own permalink URL, where it is the top-level item on the page, on the receiving site.

e.g. http://known.kevinmarks.com/2014/trying-out-the-known-version-of-indieweb/annotations/1fdc8926b9307d390ce2a69f271e4fc4 is a comment on http://known.kevinmarks.com/2014/trying-out-the-known-version-of-indieweb

gRegor Morrill

gRegor Morrill supports local comments on gregorlove.com (again) as of 2016-03-21. Local comments were accepted previously from 2002 to 2015. The hiatus was due to switching from Nucleus to ProcessWire and working on making local comments work more seamlessly with the ProcessWire webmention plugin.

Uses CSRF token protection.
Uses Akismet, logging likely spam comments; no comment moderation.
Uses an extra, hidden form input (honeypot) to prevent spam. If the form field is filled in, the comment is rejected with HTTP 403.
2024-01-07 Reducing Native Comment Spam: describes how I now close public comments after one year, still allowing signed-in people to comment. Webmentions still supported on old posts.

rubenwardy

rubenwardy supports local comments on blog.rubenwardy.com since 2023-05-07 (first comment on 2023-05-24). Webmentions are also supported. The blog itself is statically hosted. Local comments are POSTed to an express server running on api.rubenwardy.com (source). Comments are then manually moderated before being added to the static site

Uses an extra, hidden (with CSS) form input to prevent spam. If the form field is filled in, the comment is rejected with HTTP 500.

More info: https://blog.rubenwardy.com/2023/10/10/hello-indieweb/#comment-form

superkuh

superkuh.com supports local comments on any URL on the site since 2012-12-16 by appending "/@say/A comment here" to the end of *any* URL on the domain. The comment is literally typed in the URL bar and submitted as a normal URL in the browser. Then all comments are displayed on one (comments page) which the user is forwarded to by an HTML meta-refresh after making the coment. Comments to /library/ directories are saved to individual comments.html files and displayed inline with iframe. The all-site comments html file is appended to by a non-cgi webserver-agnostic perl script which tails the log files generated by nginx and parses for new log entries. Because of the admittedly weird and obscure way of submitting the comments spam is not a problem but the .html file with comments is easily edited in any text editor. Entirely local webmention receive is also supported through a similar nginx custom-POST-log-tailing perl script, https://indieweb.org/static_site#Log_HTTP_POST_data

News Media Examples

(stub section)

There are still many online news media sites that accept local comments. Please note them below in one subsection per organization.

Dropped local comments

Some sites have explicitly made the decision to drop local comments, for various reasons.

OregonLive

2019-12-29 OregonLive eliminates comments, joining other media organizations
Some of these conversations are uncivil, even downright nasty at times. Moderating the comments for off-topic posts or personal attacks takes time and resources that are better spent producing independent local news.