This is a great use for webmentions, too. I'm now using https://webmention.io for this on a blog, but previously had my own home-rolled script to receive and store them. The mechanic is honestly a lot like barnold's proposal: You can hit a service to make the webmention request (with curl or other method), make your comment and do something like $ mention comment.txt https://<remote_comment_url> with a webmention CLI (there are a bunch).

If you don't want to use javascript to display the replies from webmention.io, you can use a cron job to periodically poll, download and build a local store of replies.

alan

On 28 Jun 2025, at 6:48, jmcs wrote:

Hi there,

On Sat, 28 Jun 2025, barnold@tilde.club wrote:

After admiring a club web page such as, say,
http://tilde.club/~barnold/ , you want to make a comment to say how
wonderful it is.

In your account on club, you create a text file comment.txt saying "Love
your page!". Then at a shell prompt you run

$ ~barnold/bin/make-comment comment.txt

which adds the contents of your comment.txt to a comment page, say
http://tilde.club/~barnold/comments.html . Since you were logged in at
club, your comment is automatically attributed to you.

I'm not aware of anything exactly like this. It's not a bad idea as
such, but it'd require some coordination among everyone involved.

• all the users would need to have a comments.html page with the same
  format
• this hypothetical script would have to accept several params: user you
  are commenting to, maybe url you are commenting about (is it a comment

to the page, a blog post...?)

• html could make this a bit messy: this script would have to insert
  some text not at the end of a page, but before any </body> or whatnot

I guess the need to coordinate all of this might be the reason people
would most likely set up their own guestbook (that often don't require
abandoning the browser to make a comment)

I like the idea of it being "internal" to a particular tilde, and using
the username to signify authory directly, but I'm not sure what sort of
comitee you'd need to coordinate this

a simpler system would be to have a file somehwere with maybe this
format (writable by everyone?):

URL_YOU_ARE_COMMENTING (space) date? (space) user (space) message

and, everyone that wanted to show messages in a page could add a bit of
cgi doing "grep (^current_url) /var/www/this/file_that_saves_comments"

... it would have fewer moving parts, maybe

I don't know, I like thinking out loud :D. Maybe there's already
something I'm not aware of, let's see

Does such a thing already exist? If not, is there any show-stopper that
makes it infeasible?

Thanks,

--
barnold http://tilde.club/~barnold/
Saigon 17:32 ICT ► 25.0°C ◆ Clouds ◆ 28Km/h W ◆ 94% RH

Regards,
jmcs