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Intense Debate promises to revolutionize blog commenting, but will it live up to the promise, or will devilish details derail an otherwise fine idea?

Intense Debate is a commenting system that strives to bring a little more structure and usability to the traditional blog’s comments. Even though it is currently in beta, most of the advertised functionality seems to be in place, with several features that not only make commenting better, but integrate social web 2.0 aspects into them. I recently took Intense Debate for a test run. These are my results.

One of the things about ID is that your comments are hosted on their server, rather than yours. This had me a trifle concerned, as I didn’t want to either get locked in to their product, or lose my comments when I signed up for the service, or alternatively, lose my comments should I decide to leave the service. It turns out I was worried about nothing, for the Wordpress plugin has a handy import and exprt feature that allows yuo to bring your existing comments into their system, and then back into your native WP system should you choose to later (including any new comments made while using ID).
The fundamental premise of the system could be best expressed as one of bringing order to chaos. Traditional commenting systems are listed in date/time order, which means that if I am responding to someone else’s comment, it won’t be threaded. Intense Debate allows you to respond to a comment in a threaded fashion, that is, the response gets listed directly below, and as part of, that comment’s thread. There are other WP plugins that provide this funcionality (one of which I will be taking for a test run soon), but to have it bundled in with the rest of the features is something that I quite like.

The last thing that I really like about Intense Debate is the built in social functionality. If your commentor is also an ID user, you can rate their comment, give them props, and follow their activities on other ID enabled blogs. Your ID profile allows you to upload an avatar that shows up beside any comments you make, with a menu button that provides links to your site, profile, and rss comment stream. It helps to build community, and keep up with your friends activities around the net.

Are you sold yet? Itching to pop over to Intense Debate and install it on your blog? I might suggest that you hold up for a moment, because the system isn’t perfect (yet). Let me just preface the rest of this with the gentle reminder that ID is still under development, and as such, there will be issues. Here are a couple that I ran afoul of…

Intense Debate integrates almost seamlessly into most WP themes. This is a good thing, unless you are a particularly clever designer, or just don’t share their design sensibilities. The plugin integrates via use of transparent or semi-transparent graphics. Most of the time, this works well, unless you’re me. You may have noticed that I use a fixed gradient for my background, yes? Light on the bottom, and dark on the top. ID applies no background to the comments area, and black text. This means that the comments were only readable on the bottom third of the screen. As you scrolled up, the black text, including the comment titles, vanished against the black background. That’s not good.

ID uses it’s own css sheet that loads after yours. At the time of this writing, there is no documentation for the sheet, so it’s a bit of a guessing game as to which classes and id’s pertain to which part of the presentation. If you can figure out which bits you need to change, you can specify your own sheet to load after theirs, making it look the way you want. If you can figure it out. In all honesty, I found their css code to be a small nightmare, with far more classes and id’s than I thought would be necessary for something as straight forward as the comments section. But then what do I know, I couldn’t figure out which bits went to what.

I did leave a support ticket, and got a response that essentially said “email me, and I’ll help you out”. I did that, and waited a week with no answer. I’m still waiting….

But… if your blog uses a light background that supports black text easily, all of the above doesn’t apply. What might apply a bit more is this: as admin of my blog, I would expect a means of responding to comments from the same interface that I use to approve them. Now I am willing to admit that I sometimes miss the obvious, but if there was a button there that would allow me to reply to a recent comment, I couldn’t find it. In order to answer, I had to come back to techne-eikon, and comment directly on the page the comment was made on.

If you don’t get a lot of comments on your blog, this might be ok, or at worst a trivial annoyance. If, on the other hand, your blog is a vital hub of activity, with dozens of comments made daily on various posts, this could rapidly become a maintenance nightmare. In short, even if I had received some timely help on my (admittedly not critical) support ticket, this problem would still have been the deal breaker for me. It’s no secret that t-e is a low traffic, low activity blog. Not all of my online efforts can make the same claim.

If I were to install ID on my most recent startup, which averages 3 comments a day, I would be spending too much time just managing comments. And it’s just getting started! What happens when I’m getting 10-20-30 or more comments a day? Pass the sedatives, please

Overall, I really like Intense Debate. I like their philosophy and approach to refining blog commenting, but I can’t honestly say that it’s ready for the prime time yet. I would want to see better user level control of the graphical presentation, and require that I be able to administer and respond to comments “in house”, that is, all from the same control panel. Without that, I will have to pass on Intense Debate, as wonderful as the concept and feature set is otherwise. I will be keeping an eye on the development of this tool, in the hopes that these issues get resolved, because if they are, then I have no doubt that ID can, and will change the way we comment on blogs for the better.