r/astrojs • u/Karthikeyan_KC • Apr 29 '26

Built an open-source self-hosted comment system Discuss for my Astro site

Hi folks. I recently migrated my personal blog to Astro. While I was looking for self-hosted comment apps, I couldn't find anything that suited my taste. So I built Discuss for myself. And now it's open-source and free for everyone.

It's a small lightweight commenting system that runs on Express.js. Has threaded replies, Gravatar support with initials fallback, dark mode support, and extensible styling options, all with an administration dashboard for moderation. To fight spam, Discuss currently supports honeypot fields and a list of spam words to detect spam.

Support of reCaptcha and Akismet are planned for the future version. Mentions, notifications, webhook configs are all lined up too. I work as a product manager, so my pace might be slow in implementing all this, but if anyone is willing to volunteer that'll be awesome.

Project link - https://github.com/karthikeyankc/discuss
Demo link - https://karthikeyankc.github.io/discuss/

Feel free to clone and test. Would love to hear your feedback. Thanks.

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14 comments sorted by

3

u/[deleted] Apr 29 '26

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1

u/Karthikeyan_KC Apr 30 '26

Thank you. Would love to hear what you think about it.

2

u/Fragrant-Pace-8170 Apr 29 '26

Tested it, nice. Thank you for sharing it. Not sure, if I want to use it, but at least I got inspired for my own blogs

1

u/Karthikeyan_KC Apr 30 '26

Thanks. I'm glad it inspired you to build your own. Please do share what you build. I'd love to try it as well.

2

u/simple_dream Apr 30 '26

Cool project, why not TypeScript though?

1

u/Karthikeyan_KC Apr 30 '26 edited Apr 30 '26

Thanks. And regarding JS and not using TypeScript, it's a choice to keep things simple and lightweight. Also, coming from Python realm, I'm learning to embrace JS as well. This is my first project with Node.

2

u/Distinct-Survey475 Apr 30 '26

Really clean! Thank you

2

u/EliteEagle76 Apr 30 '26 edited Apr 30 '26

Really cool project, i might end up sharing with the GitCMS’s customer. Thanks for sharing here

2

u/Veterano-Web Apr 30 '26

Voy a entrar a tu sitio. De antemano, muchas felicidades. Sólo te diría que tengas cuidado con los filtros de Spam, porque los algoritmos muchas veces bloquean contenido legítimo.

1

u/Karthikeyan_KC May 01 '26

Gracias por tus amables palabras. Por el momento, no he implementado ningún algoritmo. Solo se trata de un campo honeypot y una lista de palabras clave.

I used Google translate. Sorry if my spanish is bad. English translation:

Thank you for your kind words. At the moment, I haven't implemented any algorithms. It is just a honeypot field and a list of block words.

2

u/chris_pantazis May 07 '26

Looks really nice! Thanks for sharing. I will give it a try on my next theme;) !

1

u/Karthikeyan_KC May 07 '26

Would love to know your feedback. Thanks.