The-Source.com

Results: Fail

I set out about 3 weeks ago to test IntenseDebate on the blog. I listed my expectations there, and I’m sad to report that IntenseDebate has failed to meet them in almost every way.

2010 Apr 27 Update: I received a detailed email from Michael Koenig with IntenseDebate addressing my concerns. I will excerpt the portions of the email relevant to each point. Quoted text from Mr. Koenig’s response is in green. I was quite impressed with the response, and reinforces my opinion that IntenseDebate will be worth a revisit in the future.

The Good

Before I get dirty, let me say there were some features I liked:

Comment approval via e-mail

This was nice. I got an email saying a comment needed moderation, I could just reply with “approved” and Bob’s yer uncle. My favorite feature of IntenseDebate.

Alternate Log-in credentials

I liked the ability to offer OpenID and such.

Email notificiations

I liked the ability to offer email notification of comments to readers.

Easy to install (and uninstall)

Glad for the first, and sad that I have to be glad for the second.

Nice reply threading

I liked the small arrow that helped “thread” replies.

The Bad

User Name Not Consistent

This was a problem I mentioned from the very start. Despite very carefully making sure my name was set to display as “Jason”, my account name “ushimitsudoki” kept showing up. 

I sent an email to IntenseDebate about this, and got a couple of emails back that they were looking into it. The issue went unresolved.

Now, I’ll have to go in and manually fix the name I suppose. Huzzah.

Sorry for the major delay, somehow this slipped through.  We examined this bug when you had ID enabled, but we received inconsistent results which has so far made it difficult for us to troubleshoot.  We’re still investigating this to determine a cause, but so far we haven’t seen this bug pop-up anywhere else.

User URL Not Consistent

I don’t want my URL for my username to be my IntenseDebate profile page. I set it to be this blog. Very, very annoying and absolutely pointless for the user.

(This is indicitive of many of the small annoyances with IntenseDebate – too many things seem to be designed to force you to go through, or to drive traffic to IntenseDebate.com)

Inconsistent User URL: this is most likely related to #1 and something that would be corrected with #1.

Logging In

My hopes were that coming from Automattic, IntenseDebate would integrate smoothly with WordPress. It does not.

When logging on to moderate comments, one sees this:

IntenseDebate Login from within WordPress

There are at least 3 problems just with this login progress:

1. It’s in a little frame inside WordPress so you can’t see the whole thing all at one time.
2. There is no such “Profile” link to clink on like the help text at the bottom mentions.
3. You can’t logon using your WordPress.com account info, even though you can use your WordPress.com info to create your IntenseDebate account, meaning you might not even have an IntenseDebate account.

All of this means I always had to open another tab, log in to the IntenseDebate.com website using my WordPress.com credentials, then return and refresh the WordPress tab at which point I could moderate the comments.

[T]his sounds like a communication issue between our servers and your own.  Are you running wp-supercache or another similar caching plugin?  Sometimes if it isn’t configured correctly it can interrupt this configuration process.  I’m sure this is something that we can correct.

Comments Indicator in status panel

WordPress has a menu down the right side of the admin screen that adds red numbers if you have pending activities in that category, such as Plugins that have updates available or comments awaiting moderation.

When using IntenseDebate, the indicators take much longer to “sync” with reality – for example, you may approve comments and the indicator will still be present for several minutes.

[T]his is definitely related to #3 and further indicates a communication issue which is interrupting our sync.

No auto-approved comments

In WordPress commenting system, once I approve a comment from a user, I don’t need to keep on doing that. Under IntenseDebate that no longer works. I have to approve every comment from the user, even if I have approved them in the past.

(Unless they have some account with WordPress or IntenseDebate – which is almost certainly not the majority of your commenting userbase.)

Unfortunately we don’t currently track comments submitted by guest so you will need to moderate all Guest comments.  We plan on offering this very soon so that this setting will apply to those commenters as well.  You can view your settings at http://intensedebate.com/edit-site-moderation .  In the meantime you could require commenters to create an ID or WP.com account in order to post, and then this auto-approve setting will be applied.  Sorry for the inconvenience.  Again, we’ll offer this for Guests very soon.

No email when comments appear

IntenseDebate will email you when you have comments pending, but not when they appear after your approval. This behavior might work fine, but it is different than WordPress, and isn’t clearly explained.

I don’t know if you get an email when IntenseDebate auto-approves a comment, since that never occurred for me.

We don’t currently send email notifications to site admins after they approve a comment since we already sent out an email to the admins that the comment is being held for moderation.  We’re more than happy to consider this for a future release but haven’t yet had any other requests for that type of email notification.

Does not handle no comments setting well

I don’t allow comments on my Pages like “About”, “Archives” (if I could ever get it freakin’ working) and so forth. Even when I un-checked the allow comments option for those pages, the text to “Be the first to comment” from IntenseDebate displayed on the page.

Can’t edit comments with URLs in them properly

Someone posted a broken URL in the comments – they had the something like this:

(www.example.com)

Note that the parenthesis are immediately surrounding the URL. This text was “url-ifyed” by IntenseDebate with the paras intact – an obviously broken rendering.

When I edited the comment and tried to fix the HTML, IntenseDebate insted “url-ifyed” the URL inside the <a> tags, resulting is some crazy nested (and broken) markup.

[W]e’re currently working on a fix for this and should have it soon.

Slightly slows down the site

Loading the comments and scripts from IntenseDebate slows down the site a bit – not excessively slow, but when the service has so many problems, you become less interested in paying even the smallest performance penalty.

[T]his is something we take very seriously and certainly something that we would want to investigate.

No real plug-ins or the ability to customize them

IntenseDebate offers a few “plugins”. However these are just scripts you can put on your blog, and you can’t configure them at all. Compared to how flexible most WordPress plugins are, not very impressive.

Doesn’t work with WP-Touch / Mobile Views

The IntenseDebate plugin itself recommends disabling IntenseDebate comments and reverting to normal WordPress comments for mobile versions of your blog.

However, even if I did this, I still couldn’t get comments working when using WP-Touch.

[T]his is a setting that can be disabled in your Plugin Settings page in your WP admin panel.  The current default it to revert to WP comments to ensure compatibility with mobile themes.  We have plans for a full mobile version of ID but there isn’t an ETA just yet.  However, when our comment sync is working properly, all comments submitted in ID are synced back to WP so they would all still be accessible in the WP mobile theme.  Comments that are posted in WP are imported back to ID so the conversation doesn’t get interrupted.  But this most likely didn’t perform properly since there is most likely a communication issue that interrupted our sync.  This is something that we would love to troubleshoot with you and get working properly.

Restricts the size of comments

This was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I went to post a comment and IntenseDebate said it was too long and I should break it up into smaller comments. (Here is the comment)

Unacceptable.

What web browser and version did you encounter this with?  The character length issue can occur with versions of IE and is a limitation of the web browser.  The max character length for Mozilla Firefox is around 7,000 and IE around 3,000.  Because of the way browsers work, the only way comments can be posted in IntenseDebate is by including it in the URL of a script tag (we use JavaScript for this).  IntenseDebate dynamically adds a script tag with all of the comment data in the URL, so all of the comment data has to fit in the script of the URL.  All browsers limit the length of the script.

You can shorten the post URL’s and customize your URL slugs which will free up some extra characters (details at http://en.support.wordpress.com/posts/post-title-url/ ), but it also depends on the amount of data that’s being transferred.  Unfortunately we don’t have a solution for increasing the character length in versions of IE at this time.  We’ve looked at including a character counter, but there is no solid limit since the max character length changes depending on the variables mentioned above.  I wish I had better immediate news for you on this issue.  It’s definitely something that we continue to explore.

Summary

I am very disappointed in my experience with IntenseDebate. I really liked the potential of the service, and there were a few features I will miss (at least until I can find acceptable replacements).

However, the pros are vastly outweighed by the cons right now – IntenseDebate is very poorly integrated and far too many things feel like a kludge.

While it has enough potential that I would be willing to revisit it in the future, for now I’m removing it and can not recommend it.

I’m sorry to hear that you had such a bad experience with IntenseDebate.  Again, it goes without saying that we would love the opportunity to troubleshoot these issues and get everything working properly.  Of course I realize your frustration and completely understand if you’d like to hold off on reinstalling ID.  I do hope that you’ll revisit ID and give it another try in the future.