Replacing your comments with Intense Debate

Intense Debate Example
There are some very great and creative ways to design the comment section of your blog: check out these examples for some inspiration (37 Ways to Design the Comments Form, 30 and 30 More Must See Comment Designs for Web Designers).
And while I was thinking about how to design my own comment parts of my upcoming WP powered sites, I decided I should go for the easier way…which by the way kinda is the philosophy of this blog.

So just recently I’ve installed the Intense Debate commenting system on this blog. As you may notice however, the older posts with no comments are still using the built in commenting system. The reason for this is that somehow I’ve not been able to synchronize my WP account with my ID account.
The new plugin crashed and I was forced to use the older version of the plugin. Also with this version however I’m still not able to import my older comments. In general, you should not have any trouble, so don’t be alarmed.

So why did I bother then? Well I’ve got three reasons for that:

1. I want for all my Wordpress powered projects one common commenting system. Although not many of my visitors may register, some of them will be automatically registered when they’ve got an Intense Debate account already. This should encourage them to participate more interactively.

2. I’m expecting Automatticto fully integrate Intense Debate into Wordpress in the near future. It is a logical next step and I would not be surprised if they do this well before version 2.8. The acquisition by Automattic is also the reason that for example Disqus is no more an option for me.

3. It saves me a lot of development and design time when I decide to use a free WP template, which does not support gravatars and threaded comment. The Unstandard theme is a good example of this. Although you can’t design it fully to your own taste, it still is flexible enough.

So if you should also run into troubles with the newest version of Intense Debate and the support team is not able to help you out, like in my case, you should consider using the old plugin/version. And take the lack of some features for granted, I’m afraid.

UPDATE

Ironically on 23th January 2009 the Intense Debate site is down. And another con for using a third party commenting system is beeing illustrated very typical with this: it slows down my site significantly and when a post has been loaded, you can not comment!
I’ll give them yet another chance…for now.