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.