Hi all,

I was wondering whether it is possible to use lists.sr.ht as possible
comment section for pages.sr.ht or a page hosted elsewhere. The idea is
leaving a mailto: link on the page which will post a reply to a mailing
list. Subsequently a webhook could be used to notify the static host to
fetch replies using lists.sr.ht api and rebuild and republish the page.

There are some problems however, how lists.sr.ht will will deal with spams? On
any page of my blog that appears in search engines I receive loads of spam comments
and it has been an ongoing fight ever since.

Moreover, how could I link a blog page to a post on mailing list? I'm
nog going to make one mailing list per blog post, and I'm not sure
whether I can put the URL of the post inside the In-Reply-To field, so
perhaps here I have to put some sort of ID in the subject or body of
mailto: links.

I'd appreciate your thoughts on this, whether this vague idea could be
feasible at all.

Thanks.

I'm also interested in the idea of replacing services like
Disqus with a mailing list. I vaguely remember some thread 
from a year ago about an API that "will be released".
Maybe the functionality's already in place!

> Moreover, how could I link a blog page to a post on mailing list? 
I've thought of some hacky solution without using an API,
but haven't gotten around to testing it yet. It is as follows:

Create a thread for each blogpost you publish, then embed the lists.sr.ht thread page in your website. It looks like it'd be
usable, because (as with most sr.ht things) the content is clear,
upfront and without too much beside it.

An API is probably better though.

I have been doing this for my blog since lists.sr.ht was created and
it's worked quite well.

@Sol
> create a thread for each blogspot

One can indeed treat a blog post as a conversation between author and
their audience. In this regard a blog page is just a renedered form of a
mailing list thread. Basically an author can publish a markdown post to
a list representing their post and the comments will follow as replies.

However, this limits the page, since I'm going to add support for other
means of engaging in a conversation, and email is only one of them.

@Drew
>I have been doing this for my blog

Good to hear that it is working for you. However, I'm going to need to
represent my content to readers in one page, without further navigation.
I'll see whether I can come up with something, since I'm migrationg off
of a static web hosting servie to my own server.

Mehdi Sadeghi <mehdi@mehdix.org> writes:

> I was wondering whether it is possible to use lists.sr.ht as possible
> comment section for pages.sr.ht or a page hosted elsewhere. The idea is
> leaving a mailto: link on the page which will post a reply to a mailing
> list. Subsequently a webhook could be used to notify the static host to
> fetch replies using lists.sr.ht api and rebuild and republish the page.

If you don't abhor a bit of JavaScript in your page, you can try
embedding a bit of code that uses the Sourcehut paste API [0]. You can
code a form that sends a POST (create a comment), and then do a GET to
retrieve them. One comment, one paste.sr.ht item.

At a first glance I don't see a way to filter when retrieving from the
paste API, so I guess there's also a bit of legwork to figure out how to
filter comments for a single post.

That doesn't solve the problem of spam, though (which would require a
submit check or moderation). Also, you don't have comment threading.

(This idea is used by some website hosted in Github, using Github Gist as
a crude commenting platform)

And I'm not sure how Drew would react to abusing paste.sr.ht as a
commenting system :^)

Hth,

[0] https://man.sr.ht/paste.sr.ht/