Cactus Comments

I have been looking for a comment system for this blog for a while now, but could never find anything that met my needs. Luckily I recently came across Cactus Comments. It is open source, easy to set up, and allows anonymous comments.

Since I don’t trust systems such as Disqus with user privacy, Cactus being based on the Matrix protocol is really nice, it means that:

• It respects user privacy
• The site owner doesn’t have to self-host
• It’s free

Setup

The Quick Start Guide is very straightforward so I will not go into detail but the basic process is:

• Create a Matrix account
• Message cactusbot to register your site
• Embed some CSS/JS (you probably want to set commentSectionId: "{{ page.slug }}" or something similar)
• Apply some custom styling

Moderation

It took me a bit to figure out how to moderate Cactus Comments, as it is not covered in the documentation. Let’s say someone said something unpleasant on your site, here’s how to remove their comment:

1. Go to your page with the comment
2. Click “Use a Matrix client” to go to the Matrix room associated with that specific post
3. Accept the invitation and join the room
4. Click the three dots on the right of the offending comment
5. Click “Remove” (or “Report Content” if appropriate)
6. Kick/ban/mute poster of the message by clicking their name and selecting an action from the sidebar

Conclusion

Cactus Comments has so far been a great solution for comments. If you are particularly concerned about privacy, you can also use it on your own Matrix homeserver.

Feel free to try out the comment below (within reason, obviously):