About comments

To post a comment, send me a private message (via email, direct message on any social media – see my profiles) with the comment text and the article to link it to. Alternatively, if the comment is already posted on other places (e.g., Reddit, etc.), send me a link to it. Relevant comments will be included in at most 48 hours since receiving the emails.

I might find the comment on Reddit, etc., myself. I will only include it on the site if it is relevant.

This site is statically generated, so the comments here are not like those on WordPress. I don’t have a dynamic backend (unless I switch from Hakyll to Yesod) and using dynamic systems, such as Disqus adds additional obligations with regards to privacy.

However, sometimes there is a benefit of having comments. Since I could be wrong on a number of articles, I’m hoping to receive corrections. Each one of them will be credited as a manually posted comment.

I am using a mechanism to generate comments statically, appending them to the article. The engine is written in such a way that adding comments to a post is just appending to a file. See the current article for an example.

There is another alternative that I could have used to reduce the amount of work I need to do: Instead of manually posting the comment from the message, I could have a public GitHub repository for the comments and ask potential commenters to use that. This has the benefit of reducing spam and trolling by a certain ratio (due to the additional step of tying to a GitHub identity). But it requires creating a new repository, passing through approval processes, and also entails making the markdown files for the posts public, which is something I don’t want to do.

As such, for now I’ve settled into the approach of posting comments that are sent to me via private channels.