Pure Comments natively supports IndieWeb Webmentions as pure, simple notification citations — exactly as they were originally designed.

When another website or blog writes a post that links to one of your articles, they can send a Webmention to your site. Pure Comments receives the notification, verifies that the source post actually links to your post, extracts the post title, author or site name, and a short excerpt, and displays it in a dedicated Webmentions section above the comments thread.

No third-party services (such as Bridgy or webmention.io) are required: Pure Comments acts as its own native Webmention endpoint and sender.

Webmentions allow cross-blog conversations and citations to appear directly on your own site whilst ensuring your visitors' privacy is preserved and leaving you in complete control of your data.

How It Works

  1. Discovery: Your blog includes a <link rel="webmention"> tag pointing to your Pure Comments endpoint.
  2. Receiving: When an external site links to you and submits a Webmention to your endpoint, Pure Comments fetches the source page, confirms the link, and parses the title and excerpt.
  3. Moderation: Incoming Webmentions enter your moderation queue where you can review, publish, or delete them (or you can enable auto-approval).
  4. Display: Published mentions appear in a dedicated “Webmentions” block above the comments thread, complete with the source post title, site name, timestamp, and a clean excerpt.

Step 1: Configure Webmentions in Pure Comments

  1. Log into your Pure Comments administration panel.
  2. Navigate to Settings and switch to the Spam & Webmentions tab.
  3. Under the Webmentions section, check Enable Webmentions.
  4. Choose whether to Auto-approve incoming Webmentions:
    • When checked, verified Webmentions are published immediately.
    • When unchecked, Webmentions will await your review in the moderation dashboard.
  5. Click Save settings.

Step 2: Add the Discovery Tag to Your Site

Pure Comments displays your site’s discovery snippet in the settings tab. Add this tag into the <head> of your blog template:

<!-- Webmention Discovery -->
<link rel="webmention" href="https://comments.example.com/api/webmention">

Replace https://comments.example.com with the base URL of your Pure Comments installation.

If you are using Pure Blog, you can paste this tag directly into the Header Injection setting in your site configuration. Remember to do this for both Pages and Posts.

Step 3: Outgoing Webmentions

When an author replies to a comment or when someone leaves a comment that references an external URL, Pure Comments can discover the remote site’s endpoint and dispatch an outgoing Webmention, notifying them that you have linked to their article.