Comments
The native comments feature in Ghost allows you to invite members to join the discussion and participate in a community directly on your website.
How to enable comments in Ghost
Member commenting can be enabled for either All members or Paid-members only from within Ghost Admin, in the Settings → Membership → Access. Click Edit to be able to change the commenting access for your members.
You can also include a call-to-action for commenting on posts you send via email newsletter, by toggling on the option from your newsletter design settings, giving readers easy access to engage with the content you send via email.
All of our official themes support member comments by default. If using a custom theme, you can find details on how to support this feature in our theme developer documentation.
Who can comment
Commenting is limited to logged-in members. If readers want to contribute to the discussion, they need to sign up for a free or paid membership to your site. This has several benefits when it comes to fostering a healthy community around your content and helps prevent spam.
Logged-in members can create and manage comments as follows:
- Create a new comment
- Edit or delete their own comments inline on the page
- Reply to, or like, another member’s comment
- Report another member’s comment for misconduct.
Moderating comments
Moderation of comments can be handled by the publication owner and staff users with the administrator role, right from the comment thread.
To hide or unhide a comment, login to your site as a member on any device that is also logged in to your staff account, and click the three dots. We recommend using Google Chrome when moderating comments.
Are you looking for tips on community moderation and guidelines? Check out this resource which includes a community guidelines template that you can steal.
Comment notifications
The following comment email notifications are delivered:
- Authors of posts receive an email when their post has new comments.
- Members who have left comments receive an email when their comment has a new reply, this can be toggled on or off from the member’s profile in Portal.
- Site owners receive an email when a comment has been reported.
Email alert notifications can be managed from each individual staff profile in Ghost Admin, read more.
Third-party Commenting Options
If you want to implement anonymous commenting or require other advanced commenting features, see our third-party integrations for other commenting tools.
Comments for Ghost
Today we’re introducing native commenting in Ghost, so you can invite your members to participate in community discussions directly on your publication.
After Search, this was one of our most requested features of-all-time, so as well as giving you a first look at the feature, we’ve included a longer behind the scenes section at the end of this post about how (and why!) this was made.
Members who are creating their first comment will be asked to fill out their name and expertise, to add more context and depth to each contribution.
Members can reply to comments, like comments, and edit or delete their own comments. To help increase engagement, there are also built-in email notifications every time someone replies to a members comment, which can be toggled on or off from the member profile page in Portal ��
Authors also receive email notifications when conversations are happening on posts they have published.
Community moderation
We built Ghost Comments with features to help you keep your community healthy.
- On-page moderations tools — Staff users with the owner or administrator role can moderate comments right from the comment thread.
- Comment reporting — Site owners are emailed when any comment is reported by another member.
- Member-only comments — Comments can only be created by logged-in members, which helps protect you from spam and negativity.
Before introducing comments on your publication, it’s a good idea to put together some community guidelines for your members. We’ve put together a short guide and template that you can steal and modify:
Get started with comments
Ghost(Pro) users can log in and start enjoying all of this right away! If you’re a developer, self-hosting Ghost, you’ll need to upgrade to the latest version to get access to everything that’s new.
Comments are already integrated into all official themes (you’ll need to update to the latest version of your theme). Then, all you need to do is turn commenting on from the Settings → Membership page in Ghost Admin.
If you’re using a premium or custom theme, comments can be added to the post.hbs template using the new > Handlebars helper — read more in the theme docs.
Read more about free trial signup strategies:
Behind the scenes: Building comments
For those of you that have been using Ghost for a while, and can remember all the way back to 2012, the very first blog post about Ghost touted «no comments!» as a key product decision. Even in the years since then, we’ve been pretty consistent about saying «no» when people requested it.
So, what changed? Two big things.
First — As Ghost has evolved over the last few years to handle memberships, premium subscriptions and email newsletters, community has become a much more important aspects of what creators and publishers are looking for in a platform.
Today, there are a huge number of Ghost sites popping up around all sorts of different niches, but one thing they all have in common is communities of highly engaged audiences with similar interests. This is a very different perspective to the traditional «random stranger on the internet comments on blog post» model of the past.
Second — The biggest problem with building comments, historically, has been automated spam. It was the #1 reason that comments was excluded from the original idea of Ghost, because forms on the internet fundamentally get abused by spammers and it takes a Goliath amount of time and energy to (largely unsuccessfully) prevent it. There are entire companies devoted to trying to prevent comment spam.
Fortunately, we’re now able to get around this problem entirely thanks to member authentication that already exists in Ghost. The feature is not exposed publicly to strangers (and bots) on the internet, it can only be used by registered, verified members of a Ghost site.
Based on these two things we changed our mind about the idea of building comments, and decided to take a swing at building something beautiful and minimal for all Ghost publishers.
The first versions of both Search and Comments were built in the space of 5 days by two product teams when we all got together for a team retreat last month (our first since 2019). But. that’s not quite the whole story.
It actually took us many (many) cycles of building APIs, UI components, membership authentication, and email subscriptions to get all the pieces in place that allowed us to take only 5 days at the end to put together these two features.
10 years to overnight success and all that.
As with Search, we’re very aware of the fact that a simple/minimal approach we’ve taken with Comments won’t be enough for every type of publisher — so we’ve built it with extensibility in mind.
The new > helper provides an ideal hook for external integrations to embed their own code, and we’re working towards making it possible to completely replace Ghost comments with powerful 3rd party systems like Cove or Discourse.
For now, though, we’re looking forward to seeing how you use comments within all your respective communities! More updates on the way. ��
How to enable native comments in Telegram channel
From this post, you will learn how to add or remove native comments from your Telegram channel along with some tips on content moderation and more!
Telegram version 7.1 came out with a bunch of new features where one of them allows everyone to have comments under their channel posts.
It turned out that this comments feature isn’t really stand alone but it is bound to discussion groups that were introduced much earlier.
How to enable comments in Telegram channel
First of all, you need a channel and you also need to link it to a discussion group. After that, native comments will appear automatically under all your posts except those created by bots.
- Tap on the channel header.
- Open channel settings.
- Tap on the «discussion» section and link a discussion group to your channel.
It is also possible to disable them by unliking your discussion group from the channel.
One of such bots is called @grouphelpbot that you will have to set up for your discussion group. It can automatically remove spam messages and do a lot more.
If you only received the comments feature on September 30, you may want to become a Telegram beta tester to be able to get its features before they are released to everyone.
Native comments is a good move by Telegram in general that is trying to implement native solutions for popular features that were implemented via bots in the past.
If comments are there now, we can also dream about having native post reactions and in-app solutions for channels monetisation. What other features are you waiting for?
If you have any questions on Telegram or if you are willing to stay tuned on the most recent Telegram updates you can follow our @tgtester channel.
Previous article
COVID-19 layer on Google Maps and some new apps to prevent its spread
Google Maps released a new COVID-19 layer to more users in September. You may see it in the list of layers on the map view.
В Telegram-каналах появились нативные комментарии — рассказываем, как они работают
Сегодня утром вышла бета-версия Telegram 7.1.0 для Android, в которой появилось значимое нововведение — нативные комментарии к постам в каналах. Рассказываем все, что нужно о них знать.
- Комментарии стали доступны автоматически во всех каналах, к которым привязаны чаты (есть кнопка «Обсудить»).
- Комментарии к постам дублируются в чат канала как реплай к посту, продублированному в чат. Однако при переходе в комментарии отображаются только они, а не чат целиком.
- Это работает и в обратную сторону — реплай к посту или реплай на реплай к посту в чате будет отображаться также и в комментариях к записи.
- Перейти к ответам к записи можно не только из канала, но и из самого чата, выбрав автоматическое сообщение из канала и выбрав «View N Replies».
- Комментарии может писать любой пользователь, даже не состоящий в чате, но они также будут дублироваться в чат канала.
- В текущий момент пользователи не могут редактировать свои комментарии, если они не состоят в чате.
- Не состоящего в чате пользователя все равно можно в нем забанить — тогда он не сможет писать комментарии и даже просматривать оставленные другими пользователями, хотя количество комментариев ему будет видно.
- Ответы на комментарии пользователя, не состоящего в чате канала, будут приходить ему в @replies.
- Для комментариев дублируются настройки чата: если в чате запрещена, например, отправка медиа или включен медленный режим, то эти ограничения также будут действовать и для комментариев.
- Статус «Печатает» отображается не только в чате, но и в комментариях.
- Администраторы могут отвечать на комментарии анонимно.
В данный момент комментарии к постам в каналах работают именно так. Однако ближе к релизу что-то может измениться — команда мессенджера активно «допилит» эту функциональность в режиме real-time.
Напомним, что ранее комментарии в каналах Telegram реализовывались только при помощи ботов. Один из них, DiscussBot, был создан командой Telegram и имеет статус официального.
В ближайшее время стоит ждать новые бета-версии Telegram Desktop, а также клиентов для iOS и macOS, в которых также будут реализованы комментарии. Будем держать вас в курсе событий!
Благодарим читателя с ником Art Cellar и @tginfo за предоставленные подробности.