Intense Debate Comment Management

23 December 2008 12 views Comments

Written by: Shamim

Intense Debate is a powerful comment management system. It goes above and beyond the commenting system built in to Wordpress and other blogging and publishing platforms. It’s no wonder Automattic acquired Intense Debate earlier in 2008. For those who don’t know Automattic is the company behind Wordpress (blogging platform), Akismet (spam killer service) and Gravatar (creates your comment avatar). Reading the great reviews I decided to take it for a spin!

Features

The features of Intense Debate are outstanding. Anything you could possibly expect from a commenting system is part of this free service. Now they are announcing a partnership with Brightcove to bring video commenting to any javascript enabled webpage with Intense Debate code embedded.

Comment Threading
Reply-By-Email
Importing/Exporting
Commenter Profiles
Reputation Points & Comment Voting
Moderation/Blacklisting
Widgets
RSS Readers & Tracking
Twitter
FriendFeed
OpenID
Gravatar
HTML Formatting

Wordpress Integration

The default Wordpress comment system is straightforward and average. But if you want your blog comments to stand out then Intense Debate is the way to go. The installation could not be any simpler. In Wordpress 2.7 search for “intensedebate” and click install. That’s it. If you wish to change any settings a link is provided after the install completes. One of the most desirable features in the plugin is the ability to carry a “commenting profile” with you to all other IntenseDebate enabled blogs and websites. No more entering name, email and URL whenever you want to leave a comment. Some of my other favorite features are comment threading, post (comment) specific RSS feeds, comment blocking by username or IP address, sorting the comments by date, rating or last activity in 1 click, voting a comment up or down and reporting a comment as offensive.

Before you make up your mind about Intense Debate comment management take a look at what others are saying – Techcrunch, Blog Herald, ReadWriteWeb, Cnet.