Best visitor comments code?

[hiya]

I'm still looking for best comments code or plug-in so visitors can comment on my web pages, but also have a simple profile page of their own. Comments must be at least as good as Yahoo news articles comments sections (in other words simple, avatar or pic, replies possible). Someone mentioned MySQL - does that seem like the best option for both simple visitor profile pages and also visitor comments? Don't want to use Wordpress or other system that you're enslaved to with dashboards and down time. Would rather have control over it. Thanks.

[ralph.m]

Someone mentioned MySQL - does that seem like the best option for both simple visitor profile pages and also visitor comments?

That's just a storage system—a database—but you need other code (like PHP) to put stuff in there and retrieve it again.

Don't want to use Wordpress or other system that you're enslaved to with dashboards and down time. Would rather have control over it. Thanks.

You can have full control over WordPress or any other CMS. You can upload the code to your own web server and do anything to it you want. (You may be thinking of wordpress.com, where you can get a free, hosted blog. But WP is a whole lot more than this. At wordpress.org you can download the WP code and have full control over it. Same with other CMSes.)

The advantage of using a CMS is that all the code is written already, and you can start to add comments, upload pictures, videos etc. without spending a fortune getting custom code written for you.