All your comments are belong to us

Db0

Intense Debate Comments makes a significant step towards outpacing the competition. Introducing Plugins

Just in case you missed it, Intense Debate just announced that their plugin system has gone live (most likely in direct response to their competitor’s major announcement). This is the kind of news that I’ve been waiting for a while now and I’m very glad this had now been released. At the moment there are not many plugins available, only integrated seesmic and youtube comments, smilies and polls. Of all these, I’m mostly interested in the smilies right now but that’s not the important thing anyway.

The important thing is that now the functionality of IDC can be improved at the whims of the community in any direction people wish to take it. No more do people need to beg the developers to implement the latest shiny feature, they can simply code it themselves. And thus the doors of innovation are now open wide.

It’s impossible to avoid seeing the hand of Automattic behind this latest release (or as I like to call it, the feature to end all features) as they are the makers of the most popular WordPress blogging platform who’s greatest power is certainly the ability for anyone to make plugins for it. Allowing users to extend the functionality of the program on their own is the single most important capability most modern succesful software have had. From Firefox, to WordPress and now, to Intense Debate.

So now all that’s left to do if for us to add the kind of features we want to have. There’s already quite a few wordpress plugins to extend the comment functionality which could not really work with an outsourced system and all those developers finally have a way to port their functionality natively.

Hopefully, this should free the hands of the IDC developers from getting tied into an feature war and let them focus on improving the stability of the platform and squashing many of the long outstanding bugs.

Imho, IDC has just pulled the rug out of the competition. I’m now very excited on what the future will bring and so should you..What do you mean you don’t have Intense Debate installed? What are you waiting for?

WARNING: There seems to be a conflict with the prototype javascript library (which is included with WordPress and can be activated through various plugins). If after activating the plugins for your blog you are not auto-logged in and your threading buttons stop working, this is probably the reason. Disable the plugins and monitor the support topic for updates. UPDATE: 2 hours later, and this bug is squashed. Activate at will. Now that’s some quick support 🙂

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15 thoughts on “All your comments are belong to us”

  2. I hate to say this but that social commenting thing from Disqus is a very sweet feature. Very enticing. I hope that intensedebate can come up with a similar service (and hopefully one that supports reddit).

  3. what, we can do smilies now? B) o.0

    though I'm not sure embedding videos is such a good idea, could really clog up a comment thread, personally I hardly ever watch videos people post or link to, mainly due to a) lack of time and b) lack of high speed internet (due to useless phone companies not providing availability)

    1. Eh, as long as they are relevant why not. And it would allow those with typing impediments to comment as well 😉

    3. tried editing my comment due to an error I noticed after submitting it, however due to db0 replying so quick it wouldn't let me save my edit
      [can't save edit if someone has replied] So here is my edit:

      Just noticed another problem – may need to send this as a bug report – in above comment I put b followed by ) and it turned it into a picture smiley (Mr Cool). I've had to edit the sentence to put a space after the b, and had to delete a whole lot of span tags. – or at least that's what I tried to do.

      here are examples b) and b )

      1. Hey!

        Actually, I noticed that issue while replying to your comment, and made sure it was fixed pronto. It's already been fixed, as you can see 🙂

        Thanks though!

  4. Seriously? I honestly don't get it. While it's cool to see where else others are commenting on your articles, this may be useful only for the top 10% of blogs whose articles are discussed elsewhere.

    As for reddit, well, usually one can handle that with wordpress plugins but I guess that through the IDC plugin functionality, if one really wants something like this they can make it no?

  5. Yeah, it's probably a good idea to not activate smilies with lowercase letters followed by a closing parenthesis. Too many chances to activate them on random word endings B)

    Cheers for the quick support again 🙂

  7. I have all four plugins operating on my blog at the moment. Most visitor have cottoned on to the smilie's:) but are yet to use siesmic for video responses. Thanks again DB0 for being the bearer of great news

  9. Yah I noticed your little vid with you struggling to contain your cat 😛

    I think it's a nice addition and should help people with typing problems

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