Babcom: comments on static websites

Status: Dead due to changes in browsers that prevent the access used here. Needs a new dedicated service to support it.

Decentral, Anonymous Comment-System for Static Websites to survive on the battlefield into which commercial spammers and censors turned the internet.

Use it by embedding a simple snippet in the body of your site.

Babcom provides Decentral, Anonymous, Spamresistant comments on Static Websites using Freenet with Sone and a bit of Javascript.

What is this?

babcom is the internets last, best hope for peace.¹

Babcom is a commenting system for static websites. It is decentral and enables anonymous and non-anonymous commenters to interact seamlessly without giving free reign to spammers.

Thanks go to digger3 with whom I bounced ideas back and forth which led to the current plan and to Sandy from OpenITP who was really enthusiastic when I told her about this idea.

Why are you doing this?

One of my pages was hacked. Badly. So badly that I had to kill it. See its grave.

I decided to only use static pages for future projects: Unhackable (with a well-maintained host), Fast, Low-maintenance. Suited for the battlefield of the internet today.

But I still want comments. Without Spam. And without subjugating to a centralized service.

Sounds cool! Can I try it?

You already do! (see below)

Do you like it?

Reload Comments Use Node:

⚙ Babcom is trying to load the comments ⚙

This textbox will disappear when the comments have been loaded.

If the box below shows an error-page, you need to install Freenet with the Sone-Plugin or set the node-path to your freenet node and click the Reload Comments button (or return).

f you see something like Invalid key: java.net.MalformedURLException: There is no @ in that URI! (Sone/search.html), you need to setup Sone and the Web of Trust

If you had Javascript enabled, you would see comments for this page instead of the Sone page of the sites author.

<iframe id="babcom-publicsoneid" src="http://127.0.0.1:8888/Sone/viewSone.html?sone=6~ZDYdvAgMoUfG6M5Kwi7SQqyS-gTcyFeaNN1Pf3FvY"></iframe>

Note: To make a comment which isn’t a reply visible to others here, include a link to this site somewhere in the comment text.

Link to this site:

<script type="text/javascript"> /* @licstart The following is the entire license notice for the JavaScript code within this script block (script to /script).

    Copyright (C) 2014  Arne Babenhauserheide

    The JavaScript code in this page is free software: you can
    redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU
    General Public License (GNU GPL) as published by the Free Software
    Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option)
    any later version.  The code is distributed WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY;
    without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS
    FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU GPL for more details.

    As additional permission under GNU GPL version 3 section 7, you
    may distribute non-source (e.g., minimized or compacted) forms of
    that code without the copy of the GNU GPL normally required by
    section 4, provided you include this license notice and a URL
    through which recipients can access the Corresponding Source.   

    As additional permission under GNU GPL version 3 section 7,
    you may use this code under any other free software license,
    including permissive licenses like BSD and MIT.

    @licend  The above is the entire license notice
    for the JavaScript code  within these script block.
    ,*/

function loadcomments() { var freenetnode = document.getElementById("babcom-node").value var sonesearch = "/Sone/search.html?query=" var host = window.location.host; var path = window.location.pathname; var postsanchor = "post-results"; var searchquery = host + path + "#" + postsanchor; var comments = document.getElementById("babcom-comments"); var publicsone = document.getElementById("babcom-publicsoneid"); var nojswarning = document.getElementById("babcom-nojswarning"); var needsfreenet = document.getElementById("babcom-needsfreenet"); var sitelink = document.getElementById("babcom-sitelink"); /* when the function gets rerun, replace the realcomments instead of adding.*/ if (document.getElementById("babcom-realcomments")) { var cif = document.getElementById("babcom-realcomments"); cif.src = freenetnode + sonesearch + searchquery; } else { comments.innerHTML = "<iframe id="babcom-realcomments" src="" + freenetnode + sonesearch + searchquery + ""></iframe>"; } nojswarning.parentNode.replaceChild(document.createElement("p"), nojswarning); publicsone.parentNode.replaceChild(document.createElement("span"), publicsone); sitelink.innerHTML = "http://" + host + path; commentsiframe = document.getElementById("babcom-realcomments"); commentsiframe.onload = function(){ needsfreenet.parentNode.replaceChild(document.createElement("p"), needsfreenet); commentsiframe.style.width = "1024px"; commentsiframe.style.height = "400px"; } } loadcomments(); document.getElementById("babcom-node").onkeydown = function(e) { var keyCode = e.keyCode || e.which;

if (keyCode === 13) { loadcomments(); } } </script>

Footnotes

1. You might recognize this phrase from Babylon 5. There’s a reason for that: If we want all people to be able to publish online without having to succumb to the rules of centralized services, we have to use static websites: Only those can sustainably withstand the constant attacks from crackers. And to have comments in a free internet without subjugating our /visitors/ to centralized sites, we must to use local services. To enable our visitors to speak freely, we must provide anonymous comments. And to make the system resilient against censorship by denial-of-service, we must have a spam-filter. Babcom uses Freenet to provide all this. And it gets defended by many small, coordinated nodes. ↩