Tag: automattic

Intense Debate comments deactivated

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Image representing IntenseDebate as depicted i...

I’ve been using intense debate for the longest time, being a very active proponent of their comment system, hell, even getting a gift T-shirt for my efforts; but now I find myself having to disable the comment system and go back to the default wordpress comments.

 

The reason for this is that for some reason their comment system has somehow been compromised by spammers, and blatantly obvious spam comments are coming in constantly, and that is even though they are supposed to be going through Akismet which is excellent at catching this kind of stuff.

 

I didn’t take this decision lightly, I contacted support who initially thought comments were coming through the internal comments, but once I pointed to evidence that it is coming through ID, they said they were going to “look into it” and that I should fight spammer with IP bans, which is a ridiculous idea.

 

In fact, another reason why I’m ditching ID is that they have completely dropped the community ball. I have no idea what is up, but I got all excited when they got acquired by Automattic, and was expecting to see ID comments start to get rolled out in WordPress.com and stuff which would have been awesome. Instead the ID people literally fell of the map. Their active blog pretty much died, making 1 post in a year, their support either doesn’t reply, or gives worthless suggestions like IP bans on spammers. And most importantly, their development all but stopped. I haven’t seen any improvements in ID every since the automattic acquisition and that’s just sad.

 

I was content to stick with ID anyway since it’s better than my theme’s built-in ones, but now that it has also become quite a lot of work to scrub my comments every few days, enough is enough!

 

Perhaps it’s time to look into Disqus whose developers seem to be actually interested in improving and making useful.

All your comments are belong to us

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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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It keeps getting better and better: Intense Debate acquired by Automattic

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Exciting Stuff.

Automattic is one of my favorite companies. Not only because they make the best blogging platform but because they are doing it through free software and good ethics. When IDC announced that they would be using Akismet for spam control, I was glad. Now that I know that they are wholly under the umbrella of the Automattic group, I’m stoked!

IDC has already shown amazing support for WordPress. Their new plugin (which I’m testing in the Alpha version) already has awesome features that make your comment managing so much less of a headache. Now that they have the people with the definite wordpress knowledge backing them, the features and integration can only grow better.

I’m getting more excited just by thinking of the possibilities.

One thing that I’m certain will follow from this, is that we are finally going to have ID Comments on WordPress.com. As other have said, the default comment system of wordpress is in dire need of an overhaul. While definitelly superior to blogger’s (not only in comments), it is still lagging behind in necessary features for a good discussion, one of which is good threading.

Unfortunately, due to the limited nature of WordPress.com, it meant that individual users could not install either IDC or any of their competitors but now that Automattic got them, we can all foresee what will follow. WordPress.com is about to get (even better).

The only way blogger can now keep up, is if Google acquires Disqus, which I don’t find as very far fetched to tell you the truth. At least then blogger might get a decent commment system at last.

So, for all of you who have not yet jumped on the IDC bandwagon, especially if you’re self-hosting WordPress, there’s no better place than now to join.

Unfortunately for now, IDC has gone back to invitation only so if you want to try, let me know and I’ll try and get you a code if you can’t wait 😉

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The Debate is Intensifying

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Just thought I’d let y’all know that Intense Debate is stepping up their game.

The obvious thing that has changed is that they have completely revamped their hompage layout. It now feels more clean although imho the old one was not looking bad either. You can take a look at how it looks for me from the thumbmnail below.
Nevertheless, I like the new one as well and I can’t be unhappy when finally my OpenID works as well 😀

My Dashboard

The also have support for Akismet which is awesomeness. Anyone cooperating with the WordPress guys is top man in my eyes. Any money that goes to them is certainly coming back to me in the form of a better WordPress.
Plus, Akismet is pretty fucking efficient 😉

But the best part is yet to come. I’ve been waiting for their new version of the WordPress plugin since June for many sweet stuff has been foretold about it. SEO on comments, keeping your comments in your wordpress etc. Well, apparently this is coming out today as well, or at least the announcement dates. I can’t help but feel that this is partly in retaliation to the recent Disqus upgrade. Hopefully they did not rush this out for a very buggy plugin will only turn people off.

Still, this plugin has great shoes to fill. Reading about the Disqus features, my mouth waters and I need IDC to not simply catch up, but overtake them. I have faith that they will achieve it as I know some of the names working on it and that makes me feel hopeful. Add to that all the ideas I’ve given them over the past few months and I’m certain that great things are a-coming.

Still, this rapid pace of upgrades only shows how good open competition between startups is for the rest of us 😉

IDC is growing better by the week it seems and I keep finding more uses of it constantly. So, get in the game already and join my growing list of converts. Don’t worry, no mind-altering techniques have been employed, other than my charming wit of course 😉