IntenseDebate Emerges from Post-Acquisition Private Beta
In September of this year, Automattic - the company that manages the development of the popular WordPress blogging platform - acquired IntenseDebate, a plug-in designed to provide a more feature rich system for blog comments. As a result of the acquisition, IntenseDebate was immediately placed into invite-only status for new installations as they began to rework their software for higher volumes of users.
At the time, it wasn't clear when the new version of the IntenseDebate product would be publicly available. But assumptions were that it would remain under wraps until the release of WordPress 2.7. Now, IntenseDebate has returned from its post-acquisition secrecy with some "hi-octane conversational mojo."
With the new and improved product, bloggers on a variety of platforms now have the option to replace standard commenting systems with IntenseDebate's comment threading, reputation points, tweeting from the comment pane, replies by email, and OpenID logins, among other features.
But WordPress users haven't been left out. They get even more functionality with the beta of the IntenseDebate plug-in, including inline replies from the WordPress dashboard and enhanced user management features.
But does a plug-in compromise control or ownership of comments? With IntenseDebate, it's been exactly the opposite. IntenseDebate has been very careful to avoid the "walled garden" complaints that have been lobbied against other commenting plug-ins which allowed comments into the system but made it difficult - if not impossible - to get those comments out of the system.
In fact, here at ReadWriteWeb, the comment exporting functionality is one of the many reasons we've been impressed with IntenseDebate since its launch a little over a year ago:
"The single most important thing about Intense Debate is its data export options. If you are using the service in [your blog] and you decide you want to stop using IntenseDebate, you can export your comments for import into your native blogging software's comments database."
Given the quick work of the IntenseDebate development team in scaling the plug-in, it will be interesting to see what features will be unveiled over the coming months. But, even as it currently stands, IntenseDebate offers bloggers and their commenters a much richer commenting experience than what comes "out of of the box" with many blogging platforms.
Users interested in testing IntenseDebate for themselves can visit the installation area to give it a whirl.
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trying it. looks great. but a migration from disqus to it resulted in a 30% loss of comments, mostly my own.
that is an epic fail.
I installed IntenseDebate on my blog a few days ago. Now, given that I just launched it in the last week or so, I may not be the best person to address scalability and performance.
However, setup and installation was incredibly smooth when upgrading from the default comment system. The features and control available from IntenseDebate are sexy.
One thing to note is that it took about an hour for the comments from my blog to get imported. Given that I have less than 10, this was surprising.
If you want to see how it looks when it's installed, you may visit my blog by clicking on the link in my name. I won't put it here so that nobody thinks I'm spamming. :)
Cheers!
Travis
@John: Any commonality to the comments that didn't make it? Or was it just random? It would be interesting to know.
I'm not having any luck either: it's says 'login succesful' but keeps me asking for login info.
And their forum also is full of bugs and errors and complaints of other users.
@Rick: thanks for the write-up! I'd like to provide some additional info/support to John that could be useful to others as well. I'll try to keep it to a minimum to avoid turning the comment section into a support forum.
Importing Comments
@John: your import may take some time depending on the number of comments you're importing and the number of other import request that we're receiving. If you did not receive an import complete or import error email notification than this is the case. If you did receive an email, please reset your import in your plugin settings page. Please feel free to drop me an email for further support.
Thanks again,
Michael
As in any other Beta, there are going to be lots of errors in this version.
Intense debate is really useful in commenting.