Ha talk about coincidence, I'm working on "comments on static html" too, but as a use case example for my service, https://www.lite-engine.com. Why did you opt for email validation instead of captchas?

The email address is the account / user identifier. When the user gives the email address, I send them verification email which works sort of like a forgot-my-password link.

This generates a user for them without them having to register.

I still need to build logic to allow for the user to change their display name from the random sequence.

I speculate that email verification is less friction to a user then an captcha.

Maybe so, seems like disqus works that way, is there a way to moderate comments?

Not yet, still a lot of "user flows" need to be solved. For instance right now, if a user leaves a comment but never verifies their email, the comment is sort of in limbo. I'm likely going to fix that tonight so at least the "owner" of the domain can review and accept unverified comments.

Good luck with your service, I wasn't able to find an alternative to disqus, my thought was it's something a lot of people might like to do. Since our service is a essentially a general purpose cors toolkit, it's something our users could do with a bit of coding.