A space for guest comments? [Solved]

[Nziz]

How might I go about adding a comment function to my webcomic, so guests can chat about it? I know I can request a forum, but I don't think there are enough regular readers yet to make a full forum worthwhile. I've found how to add my own notes about each comic, but is there a way to let other people chime in? Thanks!

[Dr Neo Lao]

What you are after is called a ShoutBox.

There are a bunch of different third part sites that offer this service. The usual method is to sign up with a site that offers comments and they give you a small bit of code to put on the indextemplate.html file. Different services offer different features. Note that any that require you to use php or mysql won't work on CG.

Run a search for "shoutbox" or "guest comments" here in CG and you should find a dozen threads or more discussing this.

(I won't suggest any since I don't know any good, reliable ones. Hopefully someone else knows and is familiar with some. Also note that controlling spammage and malicious code can be a problem with some shoutboxes.)

[STrRedWolf]

One thing I will say is DO NOT USE TAGBOARD. It only gets us at CG in trouble with Google et all.

[Lianweijun086]

The two that I see all over Cg are cbox and shoutbox. I use cbox, but I didn't do all that much research on the subject. I have no idea if one is better than the other. My brother also uses cbox on his blog, but I get the feeling that he stole it from me... Signing up is really easy, only takes like 5 minutes, and then you can log in and change the font, color scheme, sizes, etc. There are certain options that you can't choose unless you pay though... Like you can't have messages over 200 characters unless you pay. You can click on "cbox" on my comic (yay free advertising?) or you can just look it up. Either way it's super easy.

[[geoduck]]

The two that I see all over Cg are cbox and shoutbox. I use cbox, but I didn't do all that much research on the subject. I have no idea if one is better than the other. My brother also uses cbox on his blog, but I get the feeling that he stole it from me... Signing up is really easy, only takes like 5 minutes, and then you can log in and change the font, color scheme, sizes, etc. There are certain options that you can't choose unless you pay though... Like you can't have messages over 200 characters unless you pay. You can click on "cbox" on my comic (yay free advertising?) or you can just look it up. Either way it's super easy.

Another "problem" with the free version is that it only saves 20 or so messages. Apart from that, I switched to cbox recently and it seems to be working OK.

[Nziz]

Hey, thanks for the suggestions! I'll have a look; that sounds very promising.