Hey friends,
I present to you ParlezVous. A privacy-oriented, 100% open-source and fully-managed (I host your comments for you) alternative to Disqus with the front ends built in Elm.
I’m finally at a point where I feel comfortable sharing what I’ve been working on. It’s at a very early stage still (example: the admin / moderator dashboard isn’t really usable yet), but it’s finally demo-able.
I wanted to build something which:
- Was built primarily in Elm
- Satisfies my own itch (I don’t like using Disqus for privacy reasons)
- Could potentially make me some money
If you personally see yourself using ParlezVous for your site / app / company, I would kindly ask that you submit your email in the form located at https://parlezvous.io/ so that you may be notified when you can actually add ParlezVous to your own site.
What’s Disqus / ParlezVous Exactly?
It is an embeddable commenting widget that you can add to any website to enable conversations directly in your sites. This means you can have comments within your static Hugo / Jekyll / Wordpress sites.
Roadmap
All of this should be live come February (or March at the latest).
- Admin Dashboard V1:
- Ability to create an account and add ParlezVous to your site via a simple script tag
- Basic moderation (Admin dashboard v2)
- Comment folding
There are a ton of other things I’d like to build, but I don’t yet know the relative importance / ranking (example: markdown comments vs some other features).
Future of ParlezVous
More than anything, I want to provide something open for the community to fork or use as they wish. Hopefully the 2 Elm codebases (the admin dashboard and the embed widget) serve as educational tools as well just like the RealWorld example that Richard Feldman built - which helped me grasp certain ideas while I was starting out.
I’d like for ParlezVous to grow and mature to have as many features as Disqus, but in all honesty I need to start looking for work (… I’m for hire hehe). I took wayyy too much time off to work on this. The costs are very manageable so far and I hope that ParlezVous can remain open and available forever with the promise of never shutting down and never sacrificing on user privacy so long as I can keep the lights on (much like PostHaven).
Again, if you personally see yourself using ParlezVous for your site / app / company, I would kindly ask that you submit your email in the form located at https://parlezvous.io/ so that you may be notified when you can actually add ParlezVous to your own site.
Lastly, I would appreciate any and all feedback 