Chatterbox is a self-hosted threaded comment widget for blogs and static sites (Hugo, Jekyll, Astro, Eleventy). Disqus puts ads next to your writing and sells reader data unless you pay $12–95/mo; Hyvor Talk is $8–24+/mo forever — $288–864+ over 3 years. Chatterbox is $24 once: one script tag, one Node process, one SQLite file you control.

The widget is dependency-free vanilla JS (~15 KB) in a shadow DOM, so your site's styles never leak in and its never leak out — and comment bodies render as text nodes only, XSS-safe by construction.

• Threaded comments nested to depth 4, collapse, 15-minute self-edit/delete window

• Voting with Wilson-score "Best" sorting, one vote per browser enforced server-side

• Moderation dashboard: Pending/Approved/Spam/Deleted tabs, bulk actions, IP/email blocklist

• Invisible spam defenses: honeypot, minimum time-to-submit, per-IP rate limiting, link threshold

• Reply-email notifications over your own SMTP with signed one-click unsubscribe

• Disqus XML import with dry-run preview — idempotent, never double-imports

• RSS feed of latest comments for moderating from any feed reader

• Privacy-first: IPs salted-hashed before touching disk

Runs as a Windows desktop app (local moderation) or on a $5 VPS (Docker included) — the public embed needs the VPS.

What's included:

• Windows installer download (build via npm run dist)