Intense Debate makes progress in baby steps

Intense Debate makes progress in baby steps

Posted on 10. Jul, 2009 by Andrew in Blogging, Community

Intense Debate is the Automattic www.automattic.com owned competitor to Disqus. The idea is a good one; rather than locking comments into a single blog and a single thread why not let the comments be part of a comment community and enhance the comment interface while you’re at it?

The best way to test this out is simply to leave a comment on this blog and you’ll see all the ways in which Disqus lets you interact.

Intense Debate attempts the same thing and as it’s owned by WordPress’ parent company you would be forgiven for thinking that they’re at the lead. They’re not.

What lets Intense Debate down is that it doesn’t integrate very well with WordPress! Not compared to Disqus. Reading between the lines we might suspect that Intense Debate have a scaling problem.

The good news is that ID are making progress. In the last month we’ve seen a progress of tweaks and enhancements. Today the team have announced two more;

  1. Banning Users
  2. Viewing Deleted Comments

Neither one of these two will set the world afire but they’ve both very useful addition to anyone trying to run a popular blog.

A word of caution about banning users; Intense Debate offer the IP address as a way to do this. Ouch. With a single stroke a blogger could ban all comments from a single ISP or company rather than a single user. Watch out.

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  • Jon
    Just to clarify, we (IntenseDebate) offer the ability to ban users by their user account, not just by IP. We offer the ability to block a given IP, email, or keywords as well, but these are all under the admin of the site/blog's control.

    We're working hard to improve our integration with WordPress and other Automattic properties. More on this to come in the near future.
  • Wow. Good to see you making the time to comments on little and newly launched blogs like ours. Thanks very much for your contribution and clarification. We do use IntenseDebate (branded without the space?) elsewhere and really appreciate the rolling improvements you've been making!
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