Yes, and it has replaced what Disqus was in at least a site already.
With it, anyone can use Discourse, and even at our free plan, to host a comment system for their site, and keep full control of the data, appearance, extensibility, etc.
That is the exact use case we had in mind when creating it!
You actually hit the nail on the head here, I do recommend going to a recent blog post in our blog, like Discourse is Not Going Closed Source and checking it live now.
Does this create a new topic if non existed … so if we have a post or page and we enable comments do we have to manually set up the forum post before hand or will it create on first use?
Yes, it auto-creates the topic on the first visit the post or page receives.
Out of curiosity, and forgive me if this is somewhat out of context, but can participation in an embedded comment section be restricted to only members of a private Discourse community. Meaning the blog post and the comments would be visible, but only members of our private community could comment. Not sure I would do this… just want to know if I can explore the notion mentally. No use exploring if it’s not possible.
Yes. All permission models from the forum still apply, so they would need to be a member of the forum to comment in the embedded window. The topic would need to be public, of course, to allow the comments to be visible to visitors.
How you restrict membership to your forum (invite only, approval needed, etc) is still entirely up to you.
Oh that sounds VERY interesting. Can’t wait to dig in once I have time!
