Mozilla has announced that it has teamed up with the Washington Post to bring its comment system to the news outlet. The system is called Talk and is developed by Mozilla’s Coral Project. Initially, talk will be available only in some parts of the websites and then roll out to the entirety over the coming weeks. Talk has several benefits but one of the most important is the built-in privacy; it doesn’t track users and contains no surveillance features.
In its announcement, Mozilla said:
“At Mozilla, we’re not giving up on online comments. We believe that engaging readers and building community around the news strengthens not just journalism, but also open society. We believe comments are a fundamental part of the decentralized web.
Mozilla has been researching, testing, and building software in this area since 2015. Today, our work is taking a huge step forward as the Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform – across washingtonpost.com.”
Mozilla has touted several points which make Talk stand out, firstly it’s crammed with features that let you see best comments first, ignore specific users, find the best commenters, give badges to staff members, filter out unreliable flaggers, and offer a range of audience reactions. All these features are delivered up at lightning speed; Mozilla says that Talk uses about 300kb of data to load, a few comments are shown initially then the user can load more – any new comments and reactions get responded to in real time so you don’t have to reload the page continually.
Talk will also help protect user data; rather than a user having a single account connected throughout the web (like Disqus, for example), each website will run their own Talk node in order to promote privacy.
The project is 100% free to use with the code being public and available for anybody to download and run. Mozilla offers paid services in order to help support your attempts to integrate Talk into your own website.
Source: The Mozilla Blog
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