For me comments are lifeline of a blog. Blog without comments is no more then a lifeless statue in a park. But getting comments is not an easy job. Now you can make it easy. You can get better comments.
Mostly as far as I have seen it does not matter how much good and useful content you have until you can attract people to comment on your blog. To inspire your visitors to comments you should inspire them. Only inspiration won’t do. You have to make it easy for them to comment on your blog. Until now I was using Bloggers comment system. It is not very much convenient and you need to click more then 3 times to comment on the blog. WordPress users are lucky in this case to have a good easy to use commenting system and you are done with your work in only 2 clicks. I am not saying you (Blogger user) to use WordPress. For those on Blogger and Typepad blog hosting I have a very good commenting system. I myself am using it now. This commenting system is called Intense Debate. It is as simple as WordPress commenting system and with far more features than any other commenting system so far I have seen. WordPress user can use it too. Today’s review is on this Commenting system.
Guess what, Intense Debate (Founders: Jon Fox, Josh Morgan, and Isaac Keyet) is all free.I recommend to all Blogger platform users because it user-friendly system. It has got lots of feature too. They now support Open ID. It also features Me.dium & Orkut Integration, Reply-By-Email, Lijit integration and Twitter Integration. Well just have a look at some of the astonishing feature of it as a list below.
1. Structure: The Intense Debate comment system is built to enable conversation within the comment section in addition to the normal commenting. This is one of my favourite features.
2. Profiles: With Intense Debate, a user can set up an avatar to be shown whenever they make a comment on every site we power. Also find out more about the other commentators around you. It helps to connect with your friends.
3. Reputation / Comment voting: Each user also has a reputation attached to their identity that is displayed whenever they make a comment. It will help you determine how good the commentator is.
4. Social traffic drive: They enable you to link to several major social sites you are a part of to give fellow readers an idea of who you are. In simple words you get more targeted traffic now.
5. Widgets: They have got some lovely widgets which shows Top commentators (I always wanted this), last few comments and total comment counts.
Ok so you have seen the features.Here is an example of how the comments will look. Have a look at right side image. I have integrated Intense Debate on my blog as well. Now every new post will have Intense Debate as its commenting system including today’s post. You can just have a look at it on the permanent link of this post. Now I did forgot to tell you one important thing, this commenting system works not only on blog but any other websites. It has very good spam protection system. Well I have a funny statement from them about spamming comments. They say “Since this is a new comment system spam bots don’t know how to post spam directly to it yet. When they do, they will be met with our spam prevention solution.†It looks they are challenging spammers. It has a better moderation system. They have good support system and also have a forum to solve your doubts and problems.
You are eager to try this system. Ok you can get the system at Intense Debate but wait I advice you to read the tips, warnings and advice below.
Tips: First watch their 2 minutes intro Video. They have two ways of integrating the commenting system on your blog. One is widget and other is template coding. Both the ways are hassle free. I recommend using template coding if you are good at HTML and CSS. If you are not brave enough then use the widget. I am using template integration. If you still have doubts of if it will look good on your blog or not then they have a try out code for you too. Just use it.
Warning: If you are blogging for more then 2-3 months and have many comments on your blog(25+) then while installing this comment system use “All new posts †because their import comment is currently in beta. I am on Blogger and have got nearly 98 comments. When I tried to import comments, it showed than all comments were imported but in reality many comments were not imported.
Advice: I advice you to read an article. It is a tutorial on How to Install Intense Debate Comments in Blogger Blogs
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Nice little post and I actually use something that is very similar called sezwho, which integrates very nicely with my WordPress blog. If it wasn't for that i would definitely give intense debate a go.
Thanks for your comment. I agree SezWho is a good commenting system too.
I just installed, intense debate, to my blog. It's based at wordpress, and install was easy and symple.
Yup you choose a good commenting system.
The Intense Debate Commenting System is not all it’s cracked up to be. For one thing, the I.D. points system seems very flaky. Wonder if anybody else has noticed this?
After all the crap that one particular blogging site (to remain unnamed for now) and Intense Debate put us through, forcing us to sign up if we wish to make comments there, and forcing us to open up our systems to Cookies & Javascripting (and God knows what else) so they can monitor/surveill/dossier everything we say, you would think they would consider it a priority to give us “our rightful comment-points” as a friendly little enticement to keep us participating. Apparently not the case…
Not that the “points score” is a big deal in anybody’s life, but why even have it if you can’t make it work accurately? It seemed odd that the score associated with our sign-on handle would keep bouncing around the way it has done, so we took time to mull through the various pages of postings and individually add up the points for each comment, then compared that total against the total points being published on the Profile page: Total for individual postings is 97, whereas the points showing on the Profile page are 59. WHAT IS UP WITH THAT?!
Intense Debate is basically a surveillance/censoring system that provides a blog-owner more databasing & censoring or deleting of people’s comments, with a lot of self-promotional HYPE from I.D. about how great the I.D. system is, but so far all we’ve seen has been: bogus point-scoring system, a helluva lot of hidden scriptings & ads & cookies going in and out of our hard drives, and unbelievably kludgey & slow page-loading because of aforementioned scripting, cookies, snooping, and oddball stuff. In the old days of the internet, we could just TURN OFF graphics, cookies, scripting, popups, and whatever else we did NOT want to be encumbered with, and just load the “meat” of the webpage and read what interested us. Not so with this new Intense Debate system! Intense Debate does not even try to load comments until all the aforementioned KLUDGE & CLUTTER is done coming and going, loaded and nosing around in our machines. You can try to block things like google’s or akamai’s endless snoops, but good luck at receiving page loads if you do so. And God forbid that you should have to RELOAD the page if the first time around failed–because you’re going to have to go through all that slow loading crap all over again. Or maybe you need to check something offsite before you finalize a post: Be careful about turning off Javascripting and cookies so you can traverse the Net without other sites trailing your every move, because when you come back to the posting site, ready to make your post, you probably will find your “log-in has expired,” so you’ll have to re-log in and reload the page all over again. Talk about wasting time and energy!
Furthermore, Intense Debate is rather heavyhanded in not allowing a poster to make his Profile private if he prefers. Not everyone thinks it’s a good idea to be “followed” (stalked?). Not everyone WANTS their comments to be “universal” across the entire worldwide web just because they felt moved to comment on a story on a particular site. Why isn’t there an option given for Public or Private participation? As for improving the quality of comments on a site, when I.D. is used, that’s debatable. Seems the points system mostly invites people to assault each other and compete with each other at least as much if not more than the older system where people merely commented on things and moved on. All this seems to be a distraction away from the content that the site is trying to provide.
One last irritant is that the SIGN IN and SIGN UP links are mixed up on the site. Instead of having a simple way to LOG IN, I.D. has at least three different methods and they’re all mixed up, with no clear solution until you waste hours and finally learn your way through their illogical maze.
For a company that claims to be among the “best” blogging and commenting sites on the planet, this I.D. system seems very unwieldy and aggravating. The original idea to provide content and allow folks to comment on it was pretty brilliant, and we’ve enjoyed using the “particular site in question” for quite some time, but this latest twist of forcing Intense Debate as our “gatekeeper” is pretty annoying… and may force us to go elsewhere to make our pithy remarks–which, regardless of which “Points Score” you use, seem to be pretty appeciated by other visitors of “the site in question.”