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.”