Today I learnt how to migrate comments on this site to Utterances. The comments functionality on this site has migrated from Discus to Commento and most recently, utterances. You can see the history in the comments here.

Here are the steps I took:

• Create a repo just for comments.
• Set up utteranc.es with the repo.
• Add the html below to my layout template.

<script src="https://utteranc.es/client.js"
        repo="eugeneyan/eugeneyan-comments"
        issue-term="url"
        theme="github-light"
        crossorigin="anonymous"
        async>
</script>

• Download site comments from Commento. The download is in json format.
• Figure out the GitHub API for importing issues; expected payload below.

{
  "issue": {
    "title": "Imported from some other system",
    "body": "..."
  },
  "comments": [
    {
      "body": "comment",
      "create_at": "timestamp"
    }
  ]
}

• Read the json comments, clean them up, and upload via the GitHub API (code).

Now all comments are GitHub issues. Here’s an example of how it looks like in a post. One downside is that readers will need to login via GitHub to be able to comment; hope this isn’t too big of a barrier.

If you found this useful, please cite this write-up as:

Yan, Ziyou. (Sep 2020). Migrating Site Comments to Utterances. eugeneyan.com. https://eugeneyan.com/writing/migrating-to-utterances/.

or

@article{yan2020utterance,
  title   = {Migrating Site Comments to Utterances},
  author  = {Yan, Ziyou},
  journal = {eugeneyan.com},
  year    = {2020},
  month   = {Sep},
  url     = {https://eugeneyan.com/writing/migrating-to-utterances/}
}