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About the Author
- Mark Ghosh
An avid fan of business, education, technology and finance. I lead a lean, highly focussed and capable team of Java Back End developers and Front End developers through a maze of complex software wizardry to fulfill the web maintenance needs of a large chemical manufacturer. As per Myers-Briggs Personality Types, I am an ESTJ. I pride in a project completed on time and according to plan. My hobbies include all kinds of technology, anything that I can taste and anything that goes fast or flies in the air. I like to read business books and comics in my spare time.
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Intense Debate and Disqus do it backwards… Intead of bringing the features to the blog, the blog should call the features (that they want) on the other server. Progressive Enhancement of the commenting experience instead of trying to replace it is the distinction.
Eric’s comment echoes my own view exactly, which I’d like to add to: by completely replacing the built-in WordPress commenting system, Intense Debate also makes it impossible to add any new enhancements (e.g., other plugins!) except those conceived, executed and delivered directly by Intense Debate/Automattic.
In other words, it’s like chopping off one important arm of an otherwise open system and turning it into a closed black box over which blog owners have no control.
All the best,
Greg
It might not be as much of a black box as you think – their plugin system is pretty ground-breaking and based upon the familiar structure of WordPress plugins. Anyone is free to create a plugin for ID although, yes, they have to approve it because it will be running on their system, available to all their users. My impression, however, is that they want to encourage the creation of plugins and you wouldn’t have to face any Apple Appstore-style delays or ridiculous rejections.
Yeh, this does feel nice to have back again … also, not being able to rate comments without having an ID login was a pain.
Oh, and their subscribe to comments feature doesn’t work either.
James, thanks for the feedback about rating comments. I’m Michael with IntenseDebate. Comment voting for Guests is something that we are looking at implementing soon. I’m sorry to hear that you had an issue with the subscribe feature. We haven’t received other reports, but we’re going to check it out. What mail client did this occur with?
Having said that – it was nice to see comments in moderation… for example, I can’t see my previous one now :/
My 1st exposure to the IntenseDebate commenting system was the other day when I wanted to leave a response to your post on WP winning a CMS award. I must say the interface and features looked pretty “swanky” – unfortunately I was not able to leave a comment. Note that I tried and tried and tried but without any success.
So… I’m kind of glad that you’ve disabled IntenseDebate for leaving comments.
Robert
Intense Debate is the only one of the third party WordPress plugins that I have not tried, mainly because I didn’t care for Disqus or ECHO.
Great review and thanks for saving me the time of trying it myself.
I also tried Intense Debate, but some reader feedback, coupled with my own observations, convinced me to retire it after only 24 hours. Perhaps I could have worked with the developers, but I don’t think I could have worked around my discomfort with how it affected my site’s overall look and fee.
Specific negatives are highlighted in the comments here.
I had few commentators in my blog. I’ve tried both ID and Disqus. All in all, they’re not worth the trouble.
I gave it a shot on about 11 of the sites that I maintain. The results were definitely less than satisfactory.
In addition to the problems you mentioned, page load times increased considerably. Some pages took over a minute to load; others never loaded at all.
Other users seem to be experiencing similar difficulties:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/314367
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/263387
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/262773
It was an interesting experiment, but one I’ll never indulge in again. It’s hard to believe it’s a Featured Plugin on the WordPress Plugin Repository.
These are just my opinions, based on my results with the plugin.
Latency is something we take very seriously. I would love to help troubleshoot if you’re interested. Please email me at support@intensedebate.com and I’ll be happy to check it out.
What about Disqus? I too tried ID on a few of my sites and it never seemed to work quite right. Disqus, however, has been working great.
I’m currently using ID on my blog and while i do like it and some features about it my main gripe is the bugginess. When I reply to comments from the admin screen sometimes they don’t show up for hours and sometimes it takes a while for comments in general to show up.
I also had issues with importing the comments it took a few weeks before my clean import finally decided to work.
On my old blog I was using Disqus and it seemed to worked very good I don’t recall having any problems with it but when I went to my new blog I didnt know how to get it to work correctly with my homepage.
I’ve found that most of the issues with ID come form caching. I use WP-cache on my blog and I must admit, there are times that comments will not show up in a timely fashion unless I manually delete the cache that WP-Cache maintains. Once I do that, things work as they should again.
Very interesting and detailed review, you should send an email to the ID guys to let them know that it is here, hopefully they will act upon some of the problems you observed.
For me the big reason I will not use ID on my own WordPress site is its tendency to take ALL comments from ALL past posts. This includes private posts, password protected posts, etc. I have emailed a couple of times with ID support and keep coming up with the same response: it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Until ID comes around to respecting post restrictions, I will not use it.
As for why some people refuse to comment using ID, I haven’t the foggiest idea why they would be nervous. Perhaps it’s the issue of centralizing all comments in one location. Easier to track and such.
I can relate, I had roughly the same experience. Some cool feature but in reality, few used them and I reverted back to the old comment system quickly.
I tried using it as well and I didn’t like it one bit. It is a nice idea but I prefer the default comment system.
I can fully understand why ID might not work on a huge multi-author blog such as this one. I personally love it for all the different blog/fan sites I use it on. It can be very fun, but the comment folding is annoying to me at times too because of the extra clicking you have to do to get it to work.
Also if someone doesn’t know a lick of CSS and the theme they are currently using doesn’t mesh well ID is kind of hard to understand how to customize for someone with low skill in CSS.
Well, I’ve already tried ID in the past too and left it long ago. With a “cool” effect: this synchorization thing didn’t work and I had to copy comment by comment back.
What made me leave it was, after already being pissed with some other stuff, some comments (even my ones) were not being shown. They had just disapeared! And main developers knew about the problem and simply didn’t know what to do about it.
When I discovered it, ID seemed great. Threaded comments were funny, and social comments (including voting) seemed to be like a revolution.
But WordPress also had plugins that implemented threaded comments, and now it has the feature built-in in the core.
JavaScript features seemed pretty in the beginning, but as with all other “cool JS animations”, they got boring as the time passed. Also, ID is totally against SEO tips!
With all that, WordPress does pratically everything ID proposed, with many better features. Only social comments were left, but few commenters got addicted to that… I’ve never seen anybody on any site that had a “high karma” account. Also, votes can be bad used, as for exemple somebody that didn’t like the post subject go and negative all comments.
And for this “hey look at me, I’m the same guy that commented on that other site”, Gravitar already does the job. Because of that, I think ID should had been developed to be some kind of merge between Gravitar and OpenID, they just offer the Web Service for logging in, and ppl that are logged on them can have their name, karma, vote, etc shown, but everything else remains stored on each site separately…
I’d comment on a blog in spite of its having IntenseDebate, so long as it let me sign up as a guest.
I really don’t like having so many profiles locked into so many services I don’t control.
Plus it’s an added layer of overhead, especially for a first-time user. It’s like having to get a DeviantArt account or something, just to comment on a blog. With the promise that maybe sometime in the near future you’ll see another blog that has it enabled, because they don’t mind turning over control of their comments section to Automattic either.
I mean control of more of their comments section than just the avatars. And sorry, that’s kind of a sticking point for me.
You just convinced me to turn of ID in one of my blogs.
Thanks.
Tal
I never like the intense debate or other third party comment form. I prefer to use wordpress comment form.
I couldn’t quite bring myself to activate IntenseDebate on my site. I installed the plugin, but didn’t want to send off all my comments and moderation to a third party plugin, even if it’s owned my Automattic.
Hopefully over time the best, most user friendly features of ID will filter down into the WP core.
@ Jeff: Except, double-opt in to subscribe to comments is not user-friendly…so let’s hope that one doesn’t filter down!
Hi Mark,
Thanks for your very honest (and detailed) feedback and opinions on IntenseDebate. We’re sorry you’ve chosen not to continue using us, but we’re glad you gave it a shot regardless. Either way, your feedback is really useful to us, and I’d like to address a few points in particular from your post.
* Having more flexibility in comment notifications (author roles etc) is something that other folks have asked for, and we’re forming a plan on how to tackle that within our system.
* Auto-collapse comments were initially introduced to improve navigation through heavily-commented posts, but it sounds like you (as a few others with lots of comments) would prefer threads to be expanded by default. This is another feature we’re looking to adjust/roll out in the near future.
* As part of Automattic, we are definitely working with our colleagues to further develop our Akismet integration and spam filters.
* If you saw some delays in comment synchronization, it’s probably due to the number of comments happening and them queuing up for processing. Unfortunately if you turned the plugin off, then they won’t be able to fully sync back into your WP install, because the plugin is no longer there to handle them.
We’d love to work with you to improve some of these features, so please do email me at info@intensedebate.com (so that we all get it here) if you have any other feedback. We’re all ears on how to improve the experience for you and your commenters, and will be taking this post to heart as far as our future development goes.
Thanks again,
Beau
Thanks for reading through them and the other suggestions here. As I mentioned above, I really wanted to continue but the user experience and the blogging experience was starting to suffer for many of us. I would love to take another shot sometime in the future once you and your team have ironed out a few of my few issues with the ID platform.
We had nothing but trouble with Intense Debate, and reverted back within 24 hours. Had high hopes for it after Automatic acquired them (namely that some of IDs features would become native to WP), but so far that hasn’t happened.
I’m not just running “a” blog; I actually have a privacy policy, and it says I won’t send my users’ personal information to third parties. So I don’t use services like ID, Akismet, OpenID, etc.
I like a lot of the features that ID offers, but a lot of my users are privacy-sensitive and so it just won’t work for me. It might also be an issue if you’re in a country where you have to follow certain privacy laws.
I have to say, unfortunately I too had high hopes for them, worked with their support many times to help with bugs, etc… after 6 months, I came to the same conclusion – it was just causing too much work for me. Since then, I am using disqus and honestly, I am happy I made the move. I get more comments, have hardly any bugs, and it is taking a lot of troubleshooting work off of my plate. I do think it runs a bit faster as well…. I still wish them the best of luck and hope that they get things figured out but I had to leave…
In agreement. I find it to be disappointing for bloggers and fans alike. Kinda like they are trying to reinvent the wheel?
Glad I did a search on ID before I tried to test it out, after reading your post I’m definitely sticking to my default commenting system.