Hi Danny,

I've looked into this in more detail. Postmatic's Replyable is a very good fit with Thoughtful Comments. Epoch is a comprehensive all-in-one solution which doesn't play as well with others. It's also about 10x more expensive than Replyable so free Thoughtful Comments plus paid Replyable would be a very affordable and powerful Disqus/Epoch alternative. Whether Comments Plus (which is comment notifications) or Replyable (which is comment reply via email) suite your site better is a decision up to the individual publisher.

Posting video to comments is a real challenge. Video cannot be uploaded to your server (at least not without a lot of extra costs). The easiest way to handle video would be to allow people to post either Vimeo or YouTube links into the posts. We publish a video player FV Player and we'll definitely add that functionality in the near future. I think managing video links and players is better suited to a video plugin than a comments plugin. With Giphy, it's a matter of posting images into a post. In most cases that should work (if the publisher hasn't excluded the image tag).

For our own site, we'd like to go with Markdown comments with a little javascript toolbar at the top for adding an image or formatting. We just haven't had time to find the right Markdown for comments plugin. If you have any ideas, let me know.

Markdown is extremely awesome and more so for comments. I'd like Markdown comments to be out of the box for WordPress. Loading any kind of WYSWIYG code for simple posts like comments just seems wrong to me. Expecting people to write HTML in comment boxes also seems to be asking a lot.