Spam management is the hardest thing about comments. That’s a big part of what Disqus takes care of. I know you wrote that you would want approve and delete so as to moderate comments, but it becomes a big and unpleasant task, wading through the spam comments to find the good ones.

I’d argue these aren’t problems for all but the most frequented sites. Throwing your site behind someone’s walled-garden rather than developing the 100 or so lines to deal with the problem seems a shame.

Thinking aloud: Query your one SQLite table for unchecked comments, send each to telegram/a single HTML page with ‘approve’ and ‘censor’ buttons. Auto-unapprove-and-uncheck comments with words from an editable list (NFT, Bitcoin, etc). Easy and would cater for most personal/hobby use cases.

I think you may be underestimating how bad bot spam on web forms is these days.

It’s nothing to do with how well frequented your site is; any site that can be found by a web spider is going to get bot spam.

Of course you’re completely free to try it, and indeed it’s pointless to spend any more time debating it here. You really should just try it if you want to.

I guess what I’m saying is the reason most people find it best just to use a 3rd party platform is not because nobody can write “100 lines of code” to do it themselves, but because if they do that they experience the spam problem and just decide it’s not worth it. That was my experience.

That said, it may be easier to combat spam now with a classifier using an LLM or BERT.

ISPs no longer providing free hosting and VMs, and blocking port forwarding doesn't help either.

I use cleantalk on my Drupal website (but it's also available on other systems, such as WordPress) and only get a few spam comments a month. Its also cheap: 12 dollars a year and you can earn extra credits reporting spam comments that slip through.