[boost] Thoughts on Trac wiki page commenting facility

Subject: [boost] Thoughts on Trac wiki page commenting facility
From: Niall Douglas (s_sourceforge_at_[hidden])
Date: 2015-05-30 20:48:35

Something Robert raised during the meetings at C++ Now was why can't 
people comment on Boost's Trac wiki pages? The simple answer is 
because Trac doesn't allow it and hasn't got to implementing it in 
many years (http://trac.edgewall.org/ticket/11676) despite it being 
technically as simple as appending a ticket's comments to a wiki 
page, so I spent some time researching what options are available:

1. https://trac-hacks.org/wiki/WikiCommentsPlugin

This works by inserting the comments directly into the article text.

Pros: The comments are the document. This lets the page author fix 
the problem and delete the comment where that is appropriate.

Cons: You need a trac login and editing privs to comment, which until 
a Trac 1.0 upgrade remains manually awarded by a Boost admin. No 
preview, so you need to know Trac wiki markup.

2. Disqus https://disqus.com/

This is the grand daddy of free commenting services. This works by 
you inserting some Javascript into the page where you want the 
comments to appear. AJAX does the rest. This could very easily 
patched into Trac for every wiki page by tweaking its template as per 
the instructions at 
http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracInterfaceCustomization.

Pros: Very well understood by users, in fact by everyone. Built in 
excellent spam protection. Nice UI. Just works. I also have a ton of 
ready to go infrastructure from nedprod.com for Disqus, so it's 
really very little effort for me to integrate this.

Cons: They own all your data. They serve adverts in the comment 
stream, though apparently you can now opt out. They track user visits 
and sell the information, so AdBlock and Ghostery default block 
Disqus. Comment load times can be very slow. Comments aren't indexed 
by Google, and this may decrease the value of the system.

3. Keep looking Niall!

Like none of the above? There are open source clones of Disqus you 
can host on your own infrastructure, but I have no experience with 
any of the those. If the community really doesn't like either of the 
two above, I guess I can keep looking.

Niall

-- 
ned Productions Limited Consulting
http://www.nedproductions.biz/ 
http://ie.linkedin.com/in/nialldouglas/