Intense Debate comment system removed!

Dear all readers, I’m sure you should have noticed that I had installed a new commenting system called Intense Debate about 2 weeks ago. After some research, I finally decided to give a try to Intense Debate as this will give a more interactive way of communicating with my readers.

Lets see what are the features offered by Intense Debate.

1. Improved commenting system. One of the features that attracted me was the threading where one can reply directly to a specific comment with nested replies. Blogmaster will receive alerts for replies and new comments. Another distinctive feature is the blogmaster can reply or moderate the comments via email (I didn’t try that). Users can also put smiley emoticons and check their spelling before posting.
   
   
2. Improved administration tools and powers. The blogmaster can choose the Auto-filter comments by keyword, email and IP addresses. At the same time, the blogmaster can do blacklisting by Auto-delete comments by keyword, email and IP addresses or ban users from posting. Akismet system will help prevent spamming. These tools is important as the blogmaster can easy identify the IP of the spammer and blacklist them.
   
   
3. Improved social commenting. Intense Debate allows users to post comments using services like Facebook, Twitter and OpenID. They can also sign up for an IntenseDebate profile or simply comment as a Guest.
   
   
4. Improved sharing tools. With the sharing buttons, one can share the post to Facebook, Delicious, Yahoo Buzz, Myspace, Windows Live Favourite, Twitter, Digg, Google bookmarks, Reddit, Stumbleupon and Bebo.
   
   
5. Improved visiting system to readers’ own blog. This is very helpful to me who will visit the blog of those who leave comments in my blog. With Intense Debate, one can just click to their name and it will go directly to the readers’ homepage. However, with the blogspot commenting system, those blogspot users will usually log into their Google profile before commenting. This make re-visiting difficult as when the links of the readers are clicked, it will redirect to their blogger profile before one can see the listing of their blog. Most of the time, blogspot owner do not hide their inactive blog making difficulty in choosing the correct active blog of the readers to be visited.
   

Great and attractive features right? I installed the Intense Debate but was facing difficulty with it. Initially, I can’t find the comment link on the front page. Through Google search, it directed me to sort of forum but the solutions were unclear. Through the main homepage of Intense Debate, it seem that the Q & A column was not comprehensive and detail enough to provide such solutions. All they ask to do is to uninstall and reinstall which I had tried many times but unsuccessful.

Apparently, this Intense Debate works better with Wordpress blog. The blogmaster can import all the Wordpress comments to Intense Debate but it can’t be the same with the Blogspot comments.

Besides that, the Intense Debate will hide the existing comments when I choose the option ‘display comments in posts without comments’ of which the comment links do not appear on front page. If I choose ‘display comments in all posts’, the new comment system will hide all the previous comments making all the previous post with zero comments. If I choose ‘display comments in closed comments’, the correct usual system will appear without masking the previous comments system. However, it took me a great time to discover that as there isn’t any answer in the Q & A column. The changes in the settings may not be immediate effect but will take another great length of time before the new changes take into effects. That delay really make me frustrated!

Apart from that, the Intense Debate comment system loads too slow in my blog. There are some problems with IE users as they cannot view this comment system unless they enable their Javascript which is usually off in the default settings. Even with Firefox, the loading time may be differ from time to time which will discourage commenting by readers. This is the major drawback that I felt that I shall revert back to the previous Blogspot comment system.

The major blow which I only managed to see these few days was my number of posts in my front page which is set at 6 has been reduced to 3. I am not sure whether there is any relationship with the Intense Debate system but surely it happens after I installed it. When I clicked previous entries, the number of posts shown was 6 but the new entries with this Intense Debate comment shows only 3. WHY? There might be probable that I had used too many bandwidth that Blogspot reduces the number of posts but the possibility is very low as my blog is not a famous blog with few loyal readers.

With all these major drawbacks and limitations of Intense Debate comment system, I will revert back to the original Blogspot comment system. I am now backing up the previous comments for the new posts with Intense Debate comments. So, for those out there, I am not sure whether you face similar problem. My advices are:

1. If your blog already loads very slow, do not try this system.
2. If you are emphasizes on SEO, Intense Debate is using Javascript system which will be of disadvantages in term of SEO.
3. Perhaps, best with Wordpress.com
   

That’s all for now~