11 · Comments

A comment is part of the site, not a service glued on from outside. That means the conversation under a text does not vanish along with someone else's company, and does not add third-party tracking to a reader's visit.

The instance picks the rule: anyone comments, only signed-in readers comment, or nobody does. The choice is a configuration field, not a rebuild — a site that starts with comments off and opens them six months later changes one word.

By default, where an instance says nothing, comments behave as they did before accounts existed: no registration, with a name typed in by hand. Older deployments therefore do not change behaviour when the engine version rises.