Comentario 3.0.0 Arrived: Open-Source Commenting System

This Christmas has seen a major release of Comentario, an open-source web comment server, written in Go and using PostgreSQL as storage.

First, a bit on the history. Long long time ago, in our galaxy, Commento was one of the most popular free and open-source alternatives to paid, ad-loaded, comment services such as Disqus or Google+ Comments (the latter is long gone now).

Things have been pretty quiet around Commento, though. I believe we can safely assume the project has long been abandoned, despite the numerous (almost two hundred) issues.

One day I felt I was totally fed up with some trivial things never getting fixed, so I forked it under the name Comentario (which is Spanish for comment). With a whole lot of fixes and improvements it’s become the 2.x series, which was using exactly the same database its predecessor did.

Comentario 3.0.0

Seven months and 300 commits later, an all-new release Comentario 3.0.0 has become available. And “all-new” isn’t a figure of speech here, the server has received a new database, developed from scratch, which addressed many shortcomings of the legacy product, as well as dozens of new features.

Comentario 3.0.0 Dashboard.

The list of changes is too long to cover in detail (have a look at the CHANGELOG if you’re interested). The most notable are:

• User roles and the superuser privilege
• User banning
• Uploaded avatars
• Login via Facebook (in addition to Google, Twitter/X, GitHub, GitLab)
• Non-interactive SSO
• Support for spam and toxicity-detecting extensions, such as Akismet and Perspective.
• Support for PostgreSQL versions 10 through 16
• Redesigned Dashboard (the screenshot above)
• Nearly 100% end-to-end test coverage

All existing features are still there, of course:

• Nested comments; sticky flag.
• Domain operations (clean, purge, export etc.)
• Import from Commento and Disqus
• Comment moderation
• Email notifications
• View and comment statistics

Live Demo

If you’re interested, do have a look at the live comment demo, or at the demo Administration UI (login with admin@admin / admin or test@test / test).

Self Host

If you like what you see, have a look at the Getting Started documentation. And share your feedback, of course.

The source code is hosted on GitLab, feel free to file a bug or a feature request there.

There’s more to come: next version will include Gravatar support, import from WordPress, and more!