Blog Comments Part II

A little while back, I discussed how hard it was to find a self-hosted, privacy respecting, comment system for your blog. In that post, I talked about how I had finally settled on Comentario. It was easy to set up, had many nice features, and worked really well.

The comments came flooding in.

And then two days ago, I went into the Comentario back end, and found that I couldn't sign in. And then found out all the comments from the last three weeks are totally gone.

What happened? I don't know. The error logs say something about a database issue.

Now, this normally wouldn't be an issue. I have backups of everything. But here, it is, in fact, an issue. See, when I set this up, I didn't realize that there was no docker volume for the database that Comentario uses. There isn't even an option for one, so it wasn't as if I just missed it. It's just not there. So where the hell, if I might be so frank, does the damn thing put all the data? I don't know.

So, needless to say, I'm disappointed. It's hard enough to get engagement on your posts, but once you lose people's conversations, that is gone. Getting someone to sign up to comment once is hard. Twice is impossible.

The problem is, I've not found a single thing yet that I like as much as I liked Comentario. Commento is what everyone recommends, but it hasn't been updated in years and the devs are AWOL. There are many others, but I don't know which one to choose.

I think for now, I'm just going to stick with Comentario. I'll back up manually once a week and hope that solves the issue. I'm also going to put in an issue on their GitHub. Maybe they'll be able to keep it from happening again.

Anyway, if you left a comment on my blog in the last month, it has been deleted. Not by me, but because blog comment suck. I'm sorry.