Comments Under Construction
By Harry McCracken | Monday, June 28, 2010 at 11:15 pm
If you’re a regular in Technologizer’s comments, you may have spotted a new look today: We’ve switched from plain old vanilla WordPress comments to IntenseDebate, a much fancier system that, like WordPress itself, is a product of our pals at Automattic. It brings a bevy of new features with it, including threading (so you can reply to a particular comment) and the ability to log in using your Facebook or Twitter account. (As before, you can long in with a WordPress.com ID, or comment without registering for or logging into anything.) We’re also displaying tweets that refer to a particular post along with the comments on it.
One of the best things about IntenseDebate is that it’s highly customizable. So let me know what you think–I expect to tweak our setup a bit in the days to come.
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15 Comments For This Post
June 29th, 2010 at 6:29 am
Not a fan of Intense Debate.
Much prefer Disqus.
June 29th, 2010 at 3:21 pm
It's easy for us to install ID cause its by Automatic and already available to us. Have looked at Disqus.. I think either would do personally.
June 29th, 2010 at 5:22 pm
I think that from a commenter perspective they are very similar. The good news with both is that you can edit your comment and correct spelling and grammar errors.
I prefer Disqus because I use it in more places. I really only want one commenting system. You know: one ring to rule them all.
June 29th, 2010 at 6:59 pm
I'm just happy to have more points than Ed.
June 29th, 2010 at 5:34 pm
Thanks for the feedback, Dave. (I wonder if Disqus and IntenseDebate have considered doing a deal that would let each others' users log onto the other service using the IDs they've already set up…)
–Harry
June 30th, 2010 at 6:48 pm
Howdy all, glad you're up and running with IntenseDebate. If anyone has any feedback (or other neat ideas like Harry's) we'd love to hear it. As with most things, IntenseDebate is an evolving service and we base most of our development on requests from people actually using it 😉
July 1st, 2010 at 10:53 am
I think it's ugly.
July 1st, 2010 at 6:41 pm
+1 for Disqus support. Or OpenID…
I bet the Twitter login uses my handle rather than a human name: #fail!
July 1st, 2010 at 7:07 pm
@therave: You can log in via OpenID if you prefer.
July 4th, 2010 at 11:25 am
Thanks Harry! Surely the OpenID button wasn't there before, or have I gone mad?
Something weird with the OpenID login process, though, but testing it out now…
July 4th, 2010 at 5:13 am
Intense Debate haven't yet debugged their OpenID integration:
1) Why 2 ways of logging in with open ID (typing URL or clicking login button)?
2) Using the Login link ends in an ID error page stating user as no ID account.
3) First comment via OpenID works, but my second disappeared, wondering if ID tries to create an ID account on each OpenID authentication and fails if the account already exists?
4) Creating an ID account directly using OpenID fails stating account already exists (hence thought #3). Using new account ID fails with same error as #2. Then fails login attempts via open OpenID (possibly because it's returned ID created in #2).
5) Why are comments displayed using the ID handle as the name, rather than the human readable name which is consistent with previous comments?
David Hamilton
July 4th, 2010 at 5:15 am
Intense Debate haven't yet debugged their OpenID integration:
1) Why 2 ways of logging in with open ID (typing URL or clicking login button)?
2) Using the Login link ends in an ID error page stating user as no ID account.
3) First comment via OpenID works, but all subsequent comments disappeared, wondering if ID tries to create an ID account on each OpenID authentication and fails if the account already exists?
4) Creating an ID account directly using OpenID fails stating account already exists (hence thought #3). Using new account ID fails with same error as #2. Then fails login attempts via open OpenID (possibly because it's returned ID created in #2).
5) Why are comments displayed using the ID handle as the name, rather than the human readable name which is consistent with previous comments?
David Hamilton
July 4th, 2010 at 11:40 am
OK, a couple of observations on the OpenID functionality:
The OpenID posts (like Twitter) are made using the shortened handle rather than the poster's full name. Personally I would prefer the fuller name – if only for continuity with comments that I've left in the past. I know you can customise the fields sent back by the OpenID provider, but it is impossible to know in advance how the website will utilise the fields (i.e. sometimes the handle must be unique on the site, with no spaces, but I assume Technologizer uses them differently?)
Secondly, logging in through the OpenID login link finishes with an IntenseDebate error page stating that I have no account and asking if I wanted to sign up. Presumably it should redirect back to Technologizer instead.
Otherwise, like the styling, but agree with commented above that ultimately having too many competing commenting systems is counterproductive (this is the first site I've seen with IntenseDebate).
David Hamilton
July 6th, 2010 at 6:11 am
Sorry about the multiple posts: They didn't show up immediately (i.e. within 4 hours!) and so I assumed that it had failed to post.
OpenID integration, both via Technologizer and directly on IntenseDebate needs some work, I'm afraid: I eventually discovered that the issues that I encountered seemed to relate to the lack of an account creation verification email being sent out. Without any verification, the login procedure fails… repeatedly.
Oh, and on the ID site, the change picture page immediately redirects to the /accounts/force-by-email page… (Safari)
November 8th, 2011 at 12:45 am
That is a good point, but techinically, even if I have the login form pop open via AJAX, submitting the form will require a page load. So users will still lose their input.