Oratorium Commenting

Oratorium is stand-alone commenting service that you could attach by including javascript on any page.

This was initially constructed because Ghost has no built in commenting functionality and I don't want ads funded commenting, nor tie it to one specific social platform.

Commenters must authenticate via the OpenID Connect protocol (supported by e.g. Google). (Anonymous commenting removed.)

I'm using this repo to try out architectures and language solutions. It will contain more than one implementation of the backend. Currently, a monolithic Node.js version is the only one.

Backend uses event sourcing, jwt access tokens and openid connect authentication protocol. See more in HACKING.md.

Frontend setup

cd client
yarn install ; or npm install

Link the client directory so it is reachable from your frontend (in https if that's what your frontend uses). In Ghost (blog), I've added this for the post page (linking the clients directory into the theme's assets):

<link href="{{asset "comments/comments.css"}}" rel="stylesheet" />

...

<div class="comments" id="comments"></div>
<script src="{{asset "comments/node_modules/markdown/lib/markdown.js"}}"></script>
<script src="{{asset "comments/node_modules/preact/dist/preact.dev.js"}}"></script>
<script src="{{asset "comments/client.js"}}"></script>
<script>
  SomeComments('https://fredrik.liljegren.org/comments')
    .comments('{{id}}')
    .mount(document.getElementById('comments'))
</script>
</script>

Naturally, you might want to use non-dev preact etc in a production environment.

Server setup

1. Setup EventStore.
2. See respective server for setup instructions.
   • Node.js monolithic service.

Work in progress

This is a hobby project, getting just occational focus when I have time over. It does work for my purposes, but there's much wanting.

Todo:

• Check identity async - get user identity from /users/me endpoint to pre-show already logged in user picture.
• Subscription - add anyone commenting as subscriber. Make endpoint to unsubscribe from page. Need page url to ID relation.
• Delete comment - authenticated user deleting her own comment, site admin deleting any comment. (includes adding site admin)
• User separation
  • Keep users separate in client
  • Return list of users in get comments { comments, users }
• User overview
  • GDPR compliant
  • Delete Me function
• Backends in other languages/styles
  • Python
  • Golang
  • Haskell
  • Typescript
  • Microservice node.js - one service per endpoint, fat read sides
  • Serverless kubernetes/istio/...
• Comment voting
  • Default quality 1
  • Vote up / down
  • hide/show bad (quality < 0) comments
• Reputation
  • Gather votes on user's all comments
  • Make reputation affect votes, or affect default comment quality?

Architecture

Models

Site

Page

User

Using no internal ID, the user is identified by sub and iss, due to how OpenID Connect works.

Comment

Endpoints

Events

Data flow

Changelog

1.0.0

Forking off of my old Some Comments, making some new proof-of-concept backends, using event sourcing with EventStore as backend.

Yes, I know that this is more cumbersome to quickly setup than just using sqlite, but using event sourcing is a relevant part of the architectural PoCs I'm making.

License (GNU AGPLv3)

Copyright (C) 2021 Fredrik Liljegren fredrik@liljegren.org

Oratorium is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

See COPYING.