Commentator, a free commenting system for your blog
Commentator is a simple application which provide all you need to have a powerful commenting system on your blogs or websites.
Commentator uses json files (one per article) stored on any S3-compatible storage to store your comment. The rest of the application is completely stateless.
Using a S3 compatible store as a database provide several advantages:
- Easy to use: you don’t have to setup a SQL database for example.
- Highly available storage.
- You can use any S3 tools (s3cmd for example) to interact directly with your comments if you want to.
Commentator also provides:
- Multi site support: one instance of Commentator can manage comments for multiple websites.
- An easy-to-use API to manage comments and events. A public API allows users to create or retrieve approved comments, and a admin API allows you to administrate comments (approve them or delete them for example). Everytime a comment is added an event is generated into a dedicated file on S3. The API allows you to read and delete the events. You can use this file to be notified when a new comment is added.
- Rate limiting, either by IP or using the requests
x-forwarded-forheader. - A “challenge” system to avoid spammers.
- An in-memory cache for comments, for performances and to avoid hitting S3 too much.
- Metrics about the applications exposed using the Prometheus format.
