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A couple months ago, I installed Intense Debate, hoping it would provide a nice centralized comment management system that also added some features to my various blogs. Things haven’t gone as well with my Intense Debate experiences as I’d hoped.

Issues on This Blog

Last week, I deactivated the system due to having some problems. I attempted to work with the ID folks via their Get Satisfaction page but they weren’t able to resolve things so I pulled the plugin down so that the experience on my site wouldn’t be impacted. I ran into a few issues:

• I had more trackback spam than ID could handle. At one point I had 14,000 bits of trackback spam sitting held in the spam queue. With that many items, the ID moderation screen wouldn’t even load… it would always time out.
• Moderation (even for blogs with very few comments/trackbacks) was slow. Hopefully they can work out the performance issues.
• I lost a few comments into no-man’s land for several hours. People left a couple comments, I approved them, but the comments didn’t appear on the site (or in the moderation list) for several hours. For some reason, the temporarily-lost comments did appear in the “recent comments” sidebar widget.

Issues on the OurPDX Group Blog

I encouraged Betsy to install Intense Debate when updating the OurPDX website last week, but after 24 hours on the site we pulled the plug. ID just isn’t ready for a large group blog for a couple reasons:

• The only way to allow authors to moderate comments on their posts was to make them full admins within Intense Debate. This isn’t realistic since most authors don’t need (and shouldn’t have) full administrative rights.
• With only one administrator, that person had to approve every single comment across all posts (instead of each author being able to moderate his/her own).
• Likely a related issue, but authors no longer received comment notifications for their posts. Since OurPDX asks that authors participate in discussions on their posts, not having notifications is a big inconvenience.

Overall the concept is great and it works fairly well for smaller sites… but there are definitely some performance issues and some issues for multi-author blogs that need to be addressed before I’d give the green light for Intense Debate everywhere.

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