I have been thinking about including a comments section at the end of each post, to give readers a quick and easy way to say hi or share their opinions. Nobody really write an email to share what they thought about any post.
Yesterday, I got hands on it, and search for libre alternatives, and I found Isso. I went to the documentation, found some suggested posts from other users on how to install it, but things were not clear to me. I decided to use docker-compose to avoid unmet dependencies or versions incompatibilities. I had previously used docker-compose to install Umami Analytics, precisely due to version incompatibilities when installed from source, but this time the guides on Isso included additional steps I did not understood. Like, why would they use docker-build if they already have a docker-compose.yml file? Isn’t the job of docker-compose to avoid all that? And then I have already Umami on the same localhost and ports they specified for Isso, does that matters? Where is the configuration file isso.cfg they are mentioning I have to configure? It is nowhere!
So I took a look to the installation with Python and Pypi, it was not clear neither. I had to setup some virtual environments and do some other stuffs I have never seen before. This whole thing made me realize how little I know about these subjects.
Maybe because I got a little overwhelmed, I started to think, what will the comment section add in value to the site? Is it really necessary? Is it “good” to have one of these?
I realized I wanted the comments to see if there is someone out there reading what I write. You absolutely need to make most people as comfortable as possible to have a reaction from them, and writing an email is just so much hard work and friction that nobody does that, not even me, despite I read and like a lot of blogs.
Then, and maybe sort of justifying to myself why not to set it up, to avoid all the suffering seeing I know nothing about this, I came to the conclusion that a comment section will probably be detrimental to me, the blog, and the readers. We all have seen those comment section which are infinite, where you can not find anything and just skip it. That’s a lot of web traffic the comment sections is consuming to the user, who may not want to have neither this feature(?) nor the traffic consumed. It would also keep me somehow in the attention of the comments, and as a maintainer of the “community”, which I definitely do not want to dedicate time to. Ultimately even it could influence my writing because of the fear to be judged in the comments of each post.
I finally decided not to include the comments, keeping readers free of loading something they do not want, keeping the posts clean, avoiding the increase of security risks, more in my case without knowing what was I doing, and saving “community” maintaining time. Posts will remain clean as they are, at least from my point of view, and if there is someone out there who has the infinite will and power to say hi and write some comment of my posts, there will always be available the ancient and arduous email contact.