# Allowing comments using giscus

```{post} 2023-02-12
---
tags: Sphinx, giscus, web-dev, Github
author: Adriaan Rol
---
```

As my personal website is basically a blog, I'd like readers to be able to comment on it.
Previously, I used [Disqus](https://disqus.com/) for it, but I don't really like the look and feel of it, and when googling around I found that it is also obnoxious with tracking, adverts and generally disrespecting privacy.
One of the alternatives that I was quite charmed by was [giscus](https://giscus.app/), a solution that uses [GitHub Discussions](https://docs.github.com/en/discussions) to power the comments and reactions to my blog posts.
In this post, I'll show how to set up [giscus](https://giscus.app/) for my Sphinx based website.

The main advantage of [giscus](https://giscus.app/) is that it works well, looks nice, and is free.
The main drawback is that users need to have a GitHub account to be able to react. As I am doing mostly technical writing I figure that most of my readers have a GitHub account already so it shouldn't be too much of a problem.

Getting this to work is quite straightforward.
First, create a repository on GitHub, install the [giscus app](https://github.com/apps/giscus) and select  the repository that was just created. Be sure to enable  [discussions](https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/managing-your-repositorys-settings-and-features/enabling-features-for-your-repository/enabling-or-disabling-github-discussions-for-a-repository) in the repo.
Next, follow the instructions on [giscus](https://giscus.app/) to end up with a code snippet that you can put at the bottom of each page you want to enable comments on.
When using MyST markdown, I needed no extra tags to embed it and everything worked out of the box.

```html
<script src="https://giscus.app/client.js"
        data-repo="[ENTER REPO HERE]"
        data-repo-id="[ENTER REPO ID HERE]"
        data-category="[ENTER CATEGORY NAME HERE]"
        data-category-id="[ENTER CATEGORY ID HERE]"
        data-mapping="pathname"
        data-strict="0"
        data-reactions-enabled="1"
        data-emit-metadata="0"
        data-input-position="bottom"
        data-theme="preferred_color_scheme"
        data-lang="en"
        crossorigin="anonymous"
        async>
</script>
```

The only problem with this approach is that one has to copy paste this snippet in each blog post.
In the next post I'll show how to extend a Sphinx template to include the comment section in each post automatically.