Would you pay for customizable comment system?
I was working on a side project and I was thinking of adding comments to it. I wanted to be able to customize the comments section to the site's look and feel and also to be able to add more functionality to it as time goes.
I did some looking around and none of the current solutions allow you to do this easily.
I was thinking of building a comment system that can works with themes and plugins, kinda how Wordpress works. And It could be cloud-hosted or self-hosted for those with privacy concerns.
Would you pay for such a service?
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i was looking for this myself... ended up paying 5$/mo for commento.io also curious how Indiehackers built their commenting system
I think IH commenting system is custom-made, not sure though, good question for @csallen to answer.
What features would you be interested in paying for? Something that commento doesn't offer perhaps? Would you pay for the added ability to customize your comments etc?
There cannot be fully customizable comment system. The only way to have full flexibility is to develope yourself or pay a developer to work on ad hoc changes-improvements that occur from time to time in a live commounity
The comment system would be customizable using themes and plugins to extend it. Meaning that if you wanted to add more features to it, you could create a plug-in to extend it. Let me give an example.
Let's say I want to add emoji support to my comment system. As you said, I would have to either build it myself or pay a developer. But why spend the time, money, effort to building something that's not your core product; something thats has already been built over and over again.
Where the customizable comment system would come in is that instead of having the develop such a common feature like emoji support yourself or paying a developer, you can just add it to your comments in one click of a button using plugin we or the community could make.
Yes, you are right from this point of view.
There are some things that can be customized and some others that cannot.
Emoji, some kind of notifications, profile functionality, some filtering, etc can be customized.
However there is a lot of stuff that cannot be customized mainly because it has to do with the specific website and specific features that the owner wants it to have.
For example some advanced notifications, some special filtering and sorting of news, comments, articles, etc, some advanced profile functions, some specific additional information that need extra tables in the database, some extra administration tools, etc
All this can be done by the developer only, on ad hoc basis.
So the truth is somewhere in between.
Forums can be customizable up to some point, but never in full.
I agree. It's true that it would only be able to be customized up to a certain point. The intention isn't to have full customizability but to have more options than what the current solutions offer, so can help devs save time.
Plus I'm only talking about the comments section, not planning a building a forum, that would take too much work right now.
People are already paying for non-customizable commenting https://commento.io/
Yea, I saw commento during a quick search, and a few others. Do you mean say that the market has already been validated for this idea?
A market exists for comments, need to workout how big it is for paid and if they would also pay for customizing.
Thanks @volkandkaya for the invaluable insights. I'm going perform some market research on what you advised.
I think it could be a really big product to support products in the #nocode space
@blunicorn Thanks for the feedback. You know I hadn't though about the #nocode space before.
Hei, this might be not related
https://just-comments.com/ will be shut down this year, maybe you can learn from him here and there.
Good point. I checked them out before. I'll see I can connect with him.
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