Site Stuff – New Comments System
We ‘ve got a new comments system in place on the site, one I hope will work well for us so that we ‘ll be able to stick with it.
Apologies that I ‘m having to switch this up again. This was not my plan or desire at all. I really wanted to stay with Disqus, as I liked a few of its features very much.
Unfortunately, the number of issues it was causing was growing larger all the time, and the issues were getting more serious all the time “ and the support I was able to get was just short of entirely useless.
Others ‘ mileage may vary with Disqus “ and good for you / them if it does “ but for me the lack of timely support and other headaches just became too much. If you ‘re a Friendfeed user at all, you may have come across some threads over there where other users have reported many issues with it as well.
Anyway, I had little choice but to change “ so as of a short while ago, the site is using Intense Debate for comments handling (and somewhere Brandon is chuckling).
Hopefully this change will not be too much of a pain to all of you, though I expect there will be some glitches and issues to deal with in making this transition. Here are some things to note about the changeover:
- You do not need to login “ to anything “ in order to comment.
- You will need to have one approved comment in order to have others published automatically (I monitor this as regularly as I can, so apart from comments made when I ‘m asleep, most first time comments should pass through quite quickly).
- All comments that contain a link will be held for moderation, even if you have previously published comments.
- Right now, the Latest Comments widget in the sidebar is way off “ it is showing just one new comment, and then all very old comments. I ‘m working on this and hope it will get resolved soon.
Again, apologies that we ‘ve had to make this change. I hope the new system will work well. Please let me know about any problems you have with it, or any thoughts you have about it. Thanks for your patience, and please keep commenting “ makes the site a lot of fun. 
Might as well test it out.
I've used intense debate for other sites. It worked well, but still like the ability to tweet my comment from Disqus, but you make good points. Maybe I'll switch too.
First comment on new comment system. It looks like you can subscribe to a feed of the post/blog comments. "Subscribe to Replies" means it will email the replies?
Replying to myself to see if subscription emails me when replied to. (I don't normally talk to myself like this)
@patrickj – I thought you said that once you approve the first comment future comments would not have to be approved first. (This is like the AppStore of comment systems
Anderson – Hi. I think that is what it means, just testing it myself now as well. Let me know what you see too.
Anderson – on the moderation question, that's right, that is the setting I have in place and it does not appear to work very well so far. I'm seeing that with other users' comments as well. I'll be chasing this up with Intense Debate, along with several other issues. As you can imagine, this is also a not-great result for me, as it means I currently need to approve tons more comments than I should have to.
I've also been testing the replies subscription as you have, and also not seeing good result with it as yet.
I am beginning to think comments systems are the bane of my existence
Yeah I'm not getting any emails for replies either. Good luck getting everything to work correctly.