Integrating Telegram Comments to Your Website

Cover image: Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

Comments are often a good way to increase engagement in your site. The most common comment hosting service is Disqus. However, there are some disadvantages to using Disqus:

• Bizarre and clickbaity ads if you are using the free plan
• Corresponding privacy concerns
• Increase in page loading time owing to ads

In this post, I would like to introduce to telegram comments! 🌟 Before showing how to integrate telegram comments to your site, let us briefly discuss the pros and cons.

➕ Pros:

• Telegram is highly privacy focussed
• Free
• No ads
• Telegram has over 400 million monthly users and they can use the same account to comment to your blog post
• Lots of customization options + dark theme
• Moderate your comment section and add new moderators
• Users can upload multimedia attachments
• Users can subscribe to comments

➖ Cons:

• One needs to provide a mobile number to sign up
• It appears at max 100 comments can be added to a post
• There is no thread system, the reply is like GitHub issues

Integrating to your blog

The process is fairly straight-forward and simple. First, go to https://comments.app and then go to Connect Website. Then, add your site name and domains and then click on Connect Website. This will give you a site id and code that you can now embed to your website. Note that, you can also perform a lot of customizations in this step.

Using with Jekyll

I prefer to have the site id in the _config.yml file.

...

# telegram comments
telegram_site_id: "123abc"

...

❗ Add your own site id that you have obtained from telegram.

Now, in the _includes directory, create a file telegram.html.

{% if page.comments %}
<script async src="https://comments.app/js/widget.js?3" data-comments-app-website={{ site.telegram_site_id}} data-limit="100"></script>
{% endif %}

In my posts, I have front matter comments. If it is set to true, then only comment appears. That's why I have the if page.comments conditional statement. Change if according to your preference. If you have customizations, add that too inside the script tag.

data-limit represents the number of comments that can appear, as of now, the maximum possible value is 100.

In the end, simply include telegram.html to your post layout (or any other layout where you want the comment section to appear).

...

{% if site.telegram_site_id %}
    {% include telegram.html %}
{% endif %}

...

Here's how the comment section will appear:

You can see it in action here: link.

I hope now it is clear how you can add a comment section using the telegram comments widget. Please let me know if something is not clear.