I was looking at setting up more interactivity in my site this week. I learned that buying a Chillimail email account would cost about $3 a month which seems reasonable for my small site. When I looked into social media integration it looks like you need to use Disqus which is $18 a month and up.
I’m very surprised that simply changing the delivery of how someone messages you would cause the service to become over six times more expensive. Is that really my only option? If it is I might just stick with the forms.
What are you trying to accomplish? A simple way for visitors to leave a comment, or an entire social community that’s integrated with your site?
Disqus is a bloated solution that aims to deliver the latter - it’s close in functionality to a full forum, with things like moderation and multiple user accounts for those moderators, and overkill if you just need a place for people to comment on, say, blog posts IMHO.
If you really need that, then yes, $18/mo is what you’re looking at. That, or integrate something like phpBB yourself (which is similar in functionality, but a DIY solution that requires server side installation and limited knowledge of how PHP works).
If you only need comments, try the commenting script from Commentics (free) or look into review stacks instead (and perhaps hide the scoring bit (i.e. the stars) using CSS.)
Or ask Stacks4Stacks to sell you a license to CommentStack (used to be $30 or $40 one-off), but that is officially discontinued though.
That is good to know there are some options for someone like me who may only have one or two comments on a page. Having having got the comment to work with Commentics yet. It tells me I have an error without pointing out which field is wrong.
Do you know of an online example that uses CommentStack? I might buy it but for $40 I’d like to know that it works well first.
I just posted a comment. Seems to work well. I was curious what is the red rectangle next to the comment button? If it requires cookies for one page that might be okay.
I set it to be hidden if the user doesn’t consent to be on the safe side - if a user consents, he agrees to the privacy policy which has a section about comments. There’s no technical requirement for it.
That red button is the cancel button, for when you change your mind about posting a comment, but for some reason it doesn’t load the icon at the moment. I’ll look into it later this week.
Tons, but most are after your visitors’ data (Facebook, Google) and are problematic in California, the EU, the UK and Australia because of local privacy laws there, -OR- are on a subscription basis (like Disqus and Feedbucket).
Personally, I’m all for keeping things local.
The aforementioned CommentsStack was ideal for this, but has been discontinued (or rather, the publisher left the business entirely).
You can find a number of similar projects on Github - open source and PHP based. But none are in the form of a simple draggable stack of course. You’ll have to paste that PHP code into an HTML stack to get it to work in RapidWeaver.
I talked to William from Stacks4Stacks today and he said that he is testing a new stack called GuestBook so apparently he is still developing new products.
I just got a chance to check it out today. I was wondering can I change the color of the text for the date? That medium blue/gray color it uses for the default blends right in with the background and practically disappears. I couldn’t find a place to change it.
If you know your way around CSS, you can. The date/timestamp has class “guest-timestamp“ assigned to it, so you can target that and maybe give it a background colour.
I’m not sure if the text colour is definable though - you’d have to play around with that, It could be that this is just the browser default colour for unclicked links.
No, I haven’t. Right now I’m setting up CommentStack though I’ m having some problems getting the post button to show (but I’m working on it with William.) It was strange it was working and then it just disappeared. Part of the comment test I ran also disappeared.
