A commenting system that works via email
Hi everyone, I made a commenting system that accepts submissions via email, instead of requiring a login. The back story is I wanted some interactivity for my site/blog, but I felt like requiring a signup wouldn't be a good UX. I'm looking to get feedback on it from the HN community. Please feel free to ask questions and let me know your thoughts, especially what you don't like about it. If it's a decent UX then I would like to make it OSS, as I feel that it could potentially fill a void, especially for beautiful small websites. Here's the basic flow of data: 1. When the site is…
A commenting system that works via email launched on December 8, 2023 with 49 votes, #740 of 3,780 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 2 years on.
In plain words
This is a commenting system that lets visitors submit comments via email instead of requiring account creation or login. When someone clicks a comment link on a website, their email client opens with pre-written instructions in the message body. The system receives and parses incoming emails to publish comments. It's designed for blog owners and small website creators who want reader interaction without signup friction.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
An open source software project that leverages the power of email to enable commenting on websites.
r3ply is an open-source project that allows websites to receive comments via email. It receives emailed comments on your behalf and packages them for your site to use. It can be hosted on your own domain, and there is also a (free) community hosted version on the r3ply.com domain. Enter your domain above, press "Issue Signet!" , and then host the resulting config file on your site. Then you can start receiving emails as comments addressed to <YOUR_SITE>@r3ply.com at your configured moderation channel . Or just continue reading to get a high-level overview. Thanks for looking! r3ply receives emails on your website’s behalf and packages them as comments in a way that you can configure, while…from r3ply.com
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hi everyone, I made a commenting system that accepts submissions via email, instead of requiring a login. The back story is I wanted some interactivity for my site/blog, but I felt like requiring a signup wouldn't be a good UX. I'm looking to get feedback on it from the HN community. Please feel free to ask…
Does a similar job
all alternatives →
I built an interactive HN SimulatorNov 2025 · news.ysimulator.run · ▲538Hey HN! Just for fun, I built an interactive Hacker News Simulator. You can submit text posts and links, just like the real HN. But on HN Simulator, all of the comments are generated by LLMs + generate instantly. The best way to use it (IMHO) is to submit a text post or a curl-able URL here: https://news.ysimulator.run/submit. You don't need an account to post. When you do that, various prompts will be built from a library of commenter archetypes, moods, and shapes. The AI commenters will actually respond to your text post and/or submitted link. I really wanted it to feel…
CommentblocksFeb 2026 · commentblocks.com · ▲101Hey HN, I'm a freelance web developer and got tired of the endless email chains during website QA. Clients would send screenshots with red circles, or worse, Word docs with "the button on the page with the thing." I'd spend more time decoding feedback than actually fixing stuff. So I built Commentblocks. You add a script to your staging site, send clients a link, and they click anywhere on the page to leave a comment. That's it. No signup for them, no explaining how to use it. Each comment captures the exact element, viewport size, browser, and URL. Comments show up in a dashboard or can go…
Zsync, a Reddit Alternative with the Goal to Reward Quality Comments2023 · zsync.xyz · ▲207I built this last year but never posted it anywhere, but now with Reddit hiatus it seems like the right time to give it a shot. The main goal of zsync is to foster high quality content and discussion. That's it. If it can't accomplish that, then to me it is a failure. I watched Reddit go from having high quality discussion in 2008-9 to devolving into the PC meme dumpster it is today [1]. HN still has the highest discussion quality of any "forum" I know of, but (1) it can sometimes randomly be very hostile/toxic to new tech, the most glaring example being crypto. (2) HN is basically a…
I asked an HN member for feedback and she blew my mind2010 · slideshare.net · ▲453A few days ago, I responded to a comment by bloggergirl offering to read anyone's web copy and help. I shot off an email hoping for a paragraph or two of feedback on my startup's copy. Instead I received a professional, detailed deck of tons of invaluable well thought out feedback. It must have taken her an entire afternoon. Here's a link to it: http://www.slideshare.net/shereefb/recommendations-for-bettermeans To top it off, this isn't someone with a lot of free time on her hands, she's only days away from launching her own startup (page99test) This community blows my mind!
- EHEmbed HN comments in your website2016 · comments.network · ▲137
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