Staticman no longer allows comments

[justinrummel]

Environment

• Minimal Mistakes version: 4.16.3
• Ruby gem or remote theme version: n/a
• Jekyll version: n/a
• Git repository URL: justinrummel/jr.com-mm
• GitHub Pages hosted (if yes provide URL to site): No
• Operating system: n/a

Expected behavior

Currently not able to post comments.

Steps to reproduce the behavior

It appears that Staticman is enforcing CORS, and current MM sites that use Staticman can no longer post comments. Confirmed this is also impacting your own site.

[mmistakes]

Have you filed an issue on Staticman's repo to track?

[justinrummel]

Working on the research now, posting mostly for awareness....

[mmistakes]

Curious to see what changed on Staticman's end if anything. Looking at the repo dev branch was last updated 4 months ago and master 2 months.

Wonder if where they host changed something? Guess this is another reason to host your own instance vs. using the public Staticman endpoint.

[justinrummel]

Confirmed solution at github.com/eduardoboucas/staticman/issues/278#issuecomment-475170669. Need to update from dev.staticman.net to api.staticman.net for v3.

I've tried to figure out how to host my own instance several times and failed every single time. If you figure it out and document, I'd be happy to verify the directions.

[mmistakes]

Nice. Was wondering when the dev instance would stop working.

Thanks for digging into it.

[justinrummel]

Wonder if this line needs to be updated for v3

minimal-mistakes/_includes/comments.html

Line 38 in 102924f

<form id="new_comment" class="page__comments-form js-form form" method="post" action="{{ site.staticman.endpoint | default: 'https://api.staticman.net/v2/entry/' }}{{ site.repository }}/{{ site.staticman.branch }}/comments">

[mmistakes]

Shouldn't need to change. The endpoint for v3 is set in the config. Just need to switch from dev to api there.

[mmistakes]

@justinrummel Not sure if you experienced this one yet, but the dreaded "Too many requests" error is happening again once switching to api.staticman.net v3 instead of using dev.staticman.net.

Looks like even with using a GitHub application there's still some sort of API limit Staticman is hitting and comments don't go through.

There's this issue if you want to track any developments eduardoboucas/staticman#279

[deadlydog]

Curious if you're going to make staticman v3 a first-class citizen or not? Right now in the _config.yml it only calls out staticman and staticman_v2:

comments:
  provider               : # false (default), "disqus", "discourse", "facebook", "staticman", "staticman_v2", "utterances", "custom"

I can submit this as a separate issue if you'd like?

[deadlydog]

I just found issue #2036 and left a comment on it to see if we could get it reopened regarding adding staticman v3 support.

[mmistakes]

@deadlydog I don't have any plans to change how Staticman is enabled in the theme. With all it's issues the last year I'm not really motivated to until it stabilizes.

Even the new v3 GitHub application endpoint is having it's issues. Calling it out as an official comment solution for the theme has only brought more attention to it and put me in a support role for when it goes bad.

[deadlydog]

Having the link you provided in #2036 does effectively show how to use staticman v3 with minimal configuration changes, and is just what I was looking for 👍

[VincentTam]

@deadlydog I don't have any plans to change how Staticman is enabled in the theme. With all it's issues the last year I'm not really motivated to until it stabilizes.

Even the new v3 GitHub application endpoint is having it's issues. Calling it out as an official comment solution for the theme has only brought more attention to it and put me in a support role for when it goes bad.

Under Staticman v3, no matter how the Node.JS code inside the app changes, I don't think the URL scheme (i.e. input) and the rendered output YML file structure would change. Provided that this theme's integration works well with a self-hosted Staticman v3 instance, nothing much can be done by a static blog theme, apart from offering advices in documentations/README.

Btw, I suggest using an alternative/self-hosted Staticman API instance to avoid unexpected interruption of static comments service due to unnotified update on the main public production/testing Staticman API instance, say in eduardoboucas/staticman#283. You might refer to my post for self-hosting Staticman if interested.

P.S. I wrote the linked docs for Staticman v3, and I built @staticmanlab.

[andreigi]

@deadlydog I don't have any plans to change how Staticman is enabled in the theme. With all it's issues the last year I'm not really motivated to until it stabilizes.

Even the new v3 GitHub application endpoint is having it's issues. Calling it out as an official comment solution for the theme has only brought more attention to it and put me in a support role for when it goes bad.

Glad to know I read this before using Staticman on my own site.

[justinrummel]

Thanks @VincentTam

I'll take a look at your blog post again and try to follow the directions. If there are spots that I feel are unclear I'll reach out to you.

[mmistakes]

Seems like the best approach these days is to fork the Staticman repo and spin up your own instance on a free Heroku plan.

Closing as there’s nothing the theme can do about improving the reliability of the public endpoint.

[VincentTam]

Seems like the best approach these days is to fork the Staticman repo and spin up your own instance on a free Heroku plan.

Staticman's maintainer has recommended users to set up their own API instance: eduardoboucas/staticman#317 (comment)