DigitalWonderlab.CommunityComments 1.3.1

Community Comments for Umbraco

WordPress-style comments for any Umbraco page, moderated by the same engine and from the same queue as Community Forum.

Members comment on your pages; every comment runs through an always-on deterministic moderation rules engine (spam, abuse, link-flooding, blocked words), with optional AI-assisted review that integrates with the official Umbraco.AI. The shared Community backoffice section - installed automatically - gives you a moderation queue and suite-wide settings out of the box.

Goes great with Community Forum

Comments is part of the same suite as Community Forum for Umbraco, an Umbraco-native, SEO-first discussion forum. Install both and forum posts and page comments share one moderation engine, one moderation queue, one settings screen and one optional AI add-on, with the same members and the same Moderators group.

Add comments to a page - two ways

1. No code: drop the Comments (block) into any Block List / Block Grid area. Placing the block is the opt-in, so there is nothing else to switch on.
2. Template: add the Commentable composition to a document type, tick Enable comments on the page, and render @await Component.InvokeAsync("DwlComments") in the template.

If comments do not appear on a page using route 2, the page's Enable comments toggle is off, or the document type is missing the Commentable composition (so the toggle never appears and reads as off). The component renders nothing in that case, by design. To render comments on every page using a template regardless of the toggle, invoke it with @await Component.InvokeAsync("DwlComments", new { ignoreToggle = true }).

Features

• Members-only commenting with one level of replies
• Comment composer with emoji, plus edit and delete your own comment
• Member avatars on every comment (Gravatar, with a neutral placeholder fallback)
• Action feedback as unobtrusive toasts, with inline validation instead of a full page reload
• Always-on moderation rules engine + admin-configured blocked words / spam / promotional phrases
• Optional AI moderation (Umbraco.AI) - shared with Community Forum, one toggle for both. If it errors or does not answer within 8 seconds, the rules verdict stands
• Member Report action, one open report per member per comment and rate limited; enough distinct reports auto-hide a comment for review
• Inline moderator actions (Approve / Remove) for members in the Moderators group
• Unified backoffice moderation queue + settings in the Community section
• Hold every comment for review per page, or let the rules engine decide (the default)
• Account erasure: when a member deletes their account through Community Forum, their comments stay readable but are stripped of anything identifying and shown as "[deleted user]". On a site without the forum, call ICommunityErasureService from your own delete-account flow to get the same result
• Self-contained, brand-neutral styling that picks up your site's --primary / --accent
• Honeypot + rate limiting, allow-list HTML sanitisation, CSRF-protected forms

Configuration

The "sign in to comment" prompt links to the built-in /community/sign-in page by default. Point it at your own login page in appsettings.json:

{
  "Community": {
    "Comments": {
      "LoginUrl": "/login"
    }
  }
}

A returnUrl query parameter is appended so members come back to the page they were commenting on. You can also override it per invocation via the DwlComments component.

Limitations

• Single-culture. A comment is stored without a culture, so every language variant of a page shares one conversation.
• Moderated inline or in the backoffice. Comments do not appear in the forum's front-end moderation queue; members of the Moderators group action them on the page itself, and the backoffice queue covers comments and forum posts together.
• Commenting requires a signed-in member, not a verified one. The forum's email-verification gate does not apply to comments.
• No registration flow of its own. On a site without Community Forum you need a way for members to register; the neutral /community/sign-in page handles sign-in and password reset only.
• A page's comments are loaded in full, not paged.

Umbraco 17 LTS. Free to use - see LICENSE.