Commentography

Commentography is a browser extension for Firefox designed to transform comment sections on WordPress, Discourse, and Substack sites into research tools. It enables users to cache, search, and analyze every comment encountered while browsing, with all data and analytics processed and stored locally for privacy. The tool is positioned for those seeking to conduct in-depth analysis of online discussions, such as journalists, researchers, or community managers.

The extension automatically detects supported platforms—WordPress (self-hosted or managed), Discourse forums, and Substack publications—allowing users to add any site in one click. Comments are fetched directly through the user’s open browser tab, utilizing their existing login session, and no account or server interaction is required. All cached comments, analytics, and user preferences are stored in the browser’s local extension storage, with no external requests, telemetry, or third-party data transfers involved. This privacy-focused approach ensures that user data remains entirely under their control.

Commentography offers four main interface views: Comments, Search, Analytics, and Database. The Comments view presents comments grouped by article and rendered as threaded trees, with instant loading from the local cache. Users can browse full profiles and analytics for any commenter. The Search feature allows for filtering by date, username, or keyword, supporting exact phrase matching and opening results in a shareable tab. The Analytics section provides over 40 analysis modules across nine categories, including user activity, conversation networks, sentiment, demographics, moderation, and cross-site user overlap. Specific analytics include reading level, posting rhythm, sentiment scoring, word clouds, vocabulary trends, inferred demographics such as timezone and location, and moderation tools like sock puppet detection and deleted comment tracking.

The Database view grants full control over the local comment cache. Users can import or export their entire cache as ZIP or CSV files, perform smart imports and article gap scans to ensure completeness, and view detailed coverage statistics. Commentography is free and open source, requiring no user account or server connection, and all operations are performed locally within the browser.