Add giscus comment system to your website

— 2 minute read

Giscus is primarily inspired by utterances. The main difference between the two is:

  1. Utterances is based on GitHub Issues, while giscus is based on GitHub Discussions.
  2. The comment box in utterances cannot be set at the top, but the comment box in giscus can be set at the top or bottom.

As this article highlights, Giscus offers several benefits:

  1. Have comments on this site.
  2. No monthly cost.
  3. No adds, no tracking.
  4. No maintenance overhead.
  5. Login required to comment.
  6. Low “bus factor” risk.
  7. Minimize the number of tools.
  8. Integrated comments and community discussion forum.

Maybe the only drawback is that you can't comment anonymously, but this contradicts the fifth point.

The installation steps are very simple and the process is roughly as follows:

  1. Go to Github to create a new repository (must be set to public) and enable the Discussions function.
  2. Install giscus App.
  3. Go to the giscus official website and set some options to automatically generate script code.
  4. Add the script code to the comment section of the website theme.

In the end:

  1. Comment notifications will be sent to your Github email.
  2. All comments can be managed on Github.