Menu based CSS? I like that idea, because not everybody is comfortable with style sheets. I am an experienced CSSer, but my problem was sorting out which elements applied to what… I did hear from Isaac, who pointed me in the right direction (thanks Isaac).

re: Managing Comments- Currently I am a fan of the Better Comments Manager, so that would be a good place to start. I’ll have to think about any further comments, but I will be more than happy to get back to you on that.

The problems I outlined in the article were actually the only problems I encountered, so robustness is not an issue IMHO. This is actually a good thing, as I seem to have a talent for breaking things, heh.

Cheers, Marc

Wow, quite an extensive evaluation! Thanks for taking the time to write so many insightful thoughts about Intense Debate!

I have a couple of specific responses, and a couple of general ones:

- email response to your troubles: we try to be quite responsive! Something must have fallen through the cracks. Someone will be getting back to you shortly!

- re: CSS complexity: I’ll have Isaac, who wrote our CSS, get back to you about this. I can say in general that we try to make our CSS as general as possible so that it looks good on a wide number of websites; we design our interface (and CSS) so that an experienced CSSer can modifiy it to meet there needs; and, in the future, you will see more menu-based appearance configurability.

- managing comments: this is an important issue. I would love to hear your feedback on what features would be required to build the best comment administration possible!

- re: beta: we’re spending significant cycles to improve our robustness. We have thousands of sites using our system that don’t report any problems, and our new bug report rates have fallen to a very low rate so usually any reported bugs are fixed in the next (weekly) release.

Please don’t hesitate to let me know your thoughts about any of the above, or anything else!

Cheers
Tom Keller
Intense Debate