A basic comments system has existed here for a long time, but it had to be activated for individual posts and you needed a site login to post anything. It almost never got used. I have made that a little easier today with the implementation of Telegram-hosted comments. You will see the result at the bottom of every post, including this one.
From my point of view: Telegram comments are remarkably easy to implement, add no significant performance overhead to the site's load times, and will hopefully discourage spam as commenting requires a Telegram login. I can in any case easily delete any spammy comments as they occur.
From your point of view: the barrier to adding comments is low, just requiring a Telegram authentication step which is then remembered for as long as you allow. The downside is of course the requirement to be a registered Telegram user and I have no idea how mainstream that is (I suspect not very, which would impose a requirement on you to register with yet another social platform).
As to privacy: this site collects absolutely no personal data. The commenting system is entirely run by Telegram and any comments are stored there, not on this web site. Telegram is considered a reasonably privacy-focused platform, a notch down from Signal but several notches up from Facebook and the like.
I am curious to hear whether you think that this is an appropriate comments implementation for this site and as of now you can tell me! I look forward to any feedback, positive or negative. Unfortunately, if your feedback is to be negative it will nonetheless require you to have a Telegram account in order to provide that feedback! Or you could always send me an email...
~ Steve
P.S. There is a well hidden ellipsis(...) at the top right of the comments block; clicking
this when logged in as a Telegram user allows you to subscribe to notifications, either f
or this thread or for comments across the whole site. Never miss a new comment!