I'm getting truly fed up with spam in my wiki. At this point, all comments are manually approved and I still get trouble: now it's scammers spamming the registration form with dummy accounts, which bounce back to me when I make new posts, or just generate backscatter for the confirmation email. It's really bad. I have hundreds of users registered on my blog, and I don't know which are spammy, which aren't.

So. I'm considering ditching ikiwiki comments altogether and I'm turning towards Mastodon as a commenting platforms. Others (JAK) have implemented this [as a server](https://github.com/julian-klode/mastodon-comments) but a more interesting approach for me is to simply load them dynamically from the server, which is what [this person has done](https://carlschwan.eu/2020/12/29/adding-comments-to-your-static-blog-with-mastodon/). They are using Hugo, however, so they can easily embed page metadata in the template to load the right server with the right comment ID.

I'm not sure how to do this in ikiwiki: how can we access page-specific data in [[templates]]?

Or maybe i just need to make a new template and insert it in my blog posts... pondering. --[[anarcat]]

> I have tried to make a template, and that (obviously) fails because the `<script>` stuff gets sanitized. It seems I would need to split the javascript out of the template into a base template and then make the page template refer to a function in there. It's kind of horrible and messy. I wish there was a way to just access page metadata from the page template itself... I see that the [[plugins/meta]] plugin passes along its metadata, but that's not extensible, so i'd need to either patch that or make yet another plugin. Ugh.

>> Update: I did it. I have something that kind of works that's a combination of a `page.tmpl` patch and a plugin. The plugin adds a `[[!mastodon]]` directive that feeds the `page.tmpl` with the right stuff, and adds comments through Javascript and the API. It's not pretty, but it works. You need [this page.tmpl](https://gitlab.com/anarcat/ikiwiki-bootstrap-anarcat/-/blob/01524241a1346211bad2d681f0ed634af29d5c38/templates/page.tmpl) (or at least [this patch](https://gitlab.com/anarcat/ikiwiki-bootstrap-anarcat/-/commit/491dd6bfba3bee3ce702545e7f445e227dc66b30) and [that one](https://gitlab.com/anarcat/ikiwiki-bootstrap-anarcat/-/commit/c0abd79e53b8fee60cf4582971df35e6feb957fd)) and the [mastodon.pm plugin](https://gitlab.com/anarcat/ikiwiki/-/blob/2400baee8f5bc06f810b5ed96395ee84b05943ed/IkiWiki/Plugin/mastodon.pm) from my [mastodon-plugin](https://gitlab.com/anarcat/ikiwiki/-/tree/mastodon-plugin) branch.
>>
>> I'm not even sure this is a good idea. The first test I did was a "test comment" which led to half a dozen "test reply" and then I realized i couldn't redact individual posts from there. Ugh. I don't even know if, when I mute a user, it actually gets hidden from everyone else too...
>>
>> So I'll test this for a while, I guess.