New Commenting System
September 07, 2008 | Aussie Dave | Comments 34
I am currently experimenting with a new commenting system called Intense Debate, which amongst other things, supports threaded comments, commenter profiles, as well as reputation points and comment voting. It will also allow you to upload a picture, without using Gravatar.com.
Let me know what you think. If I get mostly positive feedback, I’ll keep it. Otherwise, it is back to the old.
Filed Under: Blog Announcements
About the Author: An Australian immigrant to Israel, Aussie Dave has been blogging since early 2003.
This is a test. I have enabled Intense Debate for posts currently without comments only, since it did not seem to work when I enabled it for all posts, including those which already have comments.
As long as I don't have to "join" something new. Can't life be simple?
hmm.. so far I'm lovin' it!
It seems that load time to display blog entries has now increased dramatically. And I'm posting from a very fast new machine with an excellent connection. These pages were content heavy until now. They just got that much worse.
That doesn't sound good. Let me hear from others just to make sure that is a common problem.
Since when is life simple?
Isn't that the new McDonald's ad campaign?
Yes!! hahahaha… Give me some feedback on this commenting system when you have a chance. I'm interested to know how difficult it was to implement and any kinks you seem to have come across. I've been looking into an upgrade also but didn't want to muck anything up. And yes, the load time for individual posts is a bit longer, but not extremely. Right now, I don't think it'll affect most readers motivation to post a comment.
One more thing I noticed… a commenter who is logged into IntenseDebate will not have a direct link to their blog, rather, they're linked to their IntenseDebate profile. Slightly irritating. It simply means the blogger who wants a direct link will need to submit comments without logging into the commenting system.
One thing I like about it is if I decide to give up on it, I should be able to export these comments back to Wordpress. In other words, there is an "escape hatch."
That is annoying.
Then again, it isn't necessarily a bad thing to strip commenter blog links. Only in my case is it a bad thing.
Either way, I have a feeling you'll find a lot more interaction with this commenting system. It has a beautiful lay-out and has great potential to make a visitor more active.
I am also sure they will come out with new features/improvements based on feedback. It is a relatively young product, so it can only get better.
Is your "machine" made in China?
How did you find the new load time, Gomel?
I likes it…but wont the post reply feature make it more difficult to see new comments? I mean if I post a reply to no#1 it will be tagged to the end of that particular thread and not at the bottom end? Right? I dunno I havent tried yet. It does look nice and neat though…I says keep it.
Oh and I forgots to add; It runs okish on my PC with IE7.
Dell D630 notebook. Another thing I just noticted is that Name and email address are not being retained between sessions. No, I did not and don't want to sign up to IntenseDebate.
Weird…it has been retained for me (I am using Firefox). I am sure there are still some kinks..but I want to at least try this for a while before making a decision.
Pretty darn fast, although I too have noticed that name is not being retained, and i'm using Firefox as well
Oh wait maybe it only saves your info if you add you name AND Email…..this is a test. And…..
Fail
Hope you don't mind me jumping in here, but I can help! You can add your blog in your http://intensedebate.com/editprofile“target=”_blank”>IntenseDebate profile so that when you hover over an avatar there will be a link to your blog. Give it a try with my avatar. If you hover over it you will find three blogs that I link to. We're always looking to improve IntenseDebate though, so I welcome any feedback and thoughts on how to improve this. Please let me know! Feel free to email me. Thanks! Michael IntenseDebate
Hope you don't mind me jumping in here, but I can help! You can add your blog in your http://intensedebate.com/editprofile“target=”_blank”>IntenseDebate profile so that when you hover over an avatar there will be a link to your blog. Give it a try with my avatar. If you hover over it you will find three blogs that I link to. We're always looking to improve IntenseDebate though, so I welcome any feedback and thoughts on how to improve this. Please let me know! Feel free to email me. Thanks! Michael IntenseDebate
Hi Michael, I don't see it? Where in the profile can you add blog URLs?
It's on the left side of the page. It will be a blue tab that reads something like "add blog." Please let me know if you can find it.
ahhh… great. Yes, I see. Thanks for the info.
It's my pleasure!
That's great. It just wasn't too easy to see. Perhaps a section for blog details should be displayed as default, with the option to add more blogs.
Testing name and address retention. One moment……..
Failed. I had unblocked IntenseDebate cookies and refreshed but that made no difference.
I'm hoping Michael is monitoring this thread and will be able to either a) explain how to solve this problem or b) notify his developers of the bug
As usual, it's terribly slow on the verge of being unusable. We had it running on another smallish blog but due to the same problem replaced it again. It could help to run the blog with intense debate on an Apache server that is configured as a caching proxy to improve user experience.
I don't know if it's the comment system or what, but my screen seems to be blinking a lot when I'm on the comments page.