I’ve been waiting for this: Hashover is a free-software project that aims to replace hosted-comments services like Disqus and those offered by Facebook and others that keep your comments in their database.

Many, many blogging systems like Ode, which I use, and others like Pelican, Ghost and Octopress do not manage their own comments and most defer to Disqus to add a commenting platform.

But the problem is that Disqus is a third-party service that seeks to make money off of you. And you don’t control the comments.

So if you have a self-hosted blog, having comments that are not self-hosted seems like cheating.

I don’t know anything else about Hashover beyond what’s at their web site, but I am very excited at the prospect of an add-to-anything commenting solution like Disqus that you can host yourself.

It’s something we really, really need. And I’m glad it’s here.

More on Hashover:

• To take a deeper dive into how Hashover works, start here.
• How to use Hashover in Pelican
• Post on Hashover at Oldpapyrus.wordpress.com

Other free-software commenting systems?

I found:

• Juvia
• jskomment

I don't know if that has anything to do with my use of Unison to push and pull content from my server for Ode, but I've been seeing entries labeled comments instead of 0 Comments.

To that end, I'm posting this entry without the use of Unison to see what happens.

A minute later: I'm getting comments without the use of Unison, so it doesn't appear to have anything to do with file timestamps or permissions as affected by the file-synchronization utility I've been using for the past week or so.

A few more minutes later: Now my previous entry is showing as 0 Comments, so I am chalking this up to "stuff happening at Disqus."

Even more minutes later: Now this post carries 0 Comments. Consider this a false-alarm/something I previously did not notice in Disqus' interaction with Ode.