startups

The headline says a lot. But let me start off by writing this - I like a lot of what Intense Debate is doing… they’re a Boulder company (part of the Techstars incubator program), and as far as I’ve seen, they’re good guys. They’ve gotten some good attention, got acquired by Automattic, and even do a decent job with support (follow @mkoening to see what I mean). There’s a lot to like.

And I do want to like them. I want threaded comments to work, whether they come from Intense Debate, from their main competition, Disqus, or from someone else altogether. The point of comments in general is to use one-on-one interaction to build a community around your blog - it only makes sense to build the comment structure to reflect (and encourage) that.

However, while I want threaded comments to work, I’m seeing that the reality of an effective system for having them might be a little way off. The recent case of my blog redesign serves as good enough evidence why. Here’s the story:

I used Intense Debate here, for the 4 or so months before the recent redesign. I liked the system, I liked how it fit into my style, and I didn’t ask it to do a lot. When I redid the blog, though, I needed to some different things - I wanted a cleaner look, and I wanted the plugin to appear only on pages where comments were enabled (which seems like a valid request).

I got in touch with Michael, and though he was helpful, it became clear to me that I was on my own - I would have to do the customizations myself. With my own code. Which is fine, really… I don’t mind that too much. But I also didn’t want to spend a ton of time on it. So I decided to go with a standard system.

The problem with that, I learned, was that my comments from the last few months weren’t stored with my blog content, but in the Intense Debate system. They were gone. If I wanted them back, I had to reactivate Intense Debate, import them, then Deactivate it again. After 2 plugin upgrades and 8 hours of importing (which was still in progress at that point), I gave up. I moved on, without my comments in tow, which is why you don’t see any on any post for the last few months (which sucks).

To me, that’s an Intense Debate FAIL. I’m ok, albeit bummed, with the fact that their user interface is so inflexible. But the fact that they basically own your content, and make you go through that interface to get it back, is just silly.

Until they make the system and its workings more accessible to the average blogger (a person who is not going to spend a day custom-coding their commenting system to make sure it fits their blog design), Intense Debate is going to have problems making the jump from early adopters to universally adopted.

Maybe Disqus can do better. Or maybe, with Wordpress integration, Intense Debate can do better. Maybe it’ll be someone new. Either way though, I hope it happens.

YOUR INPUT: what do you think about threaded comments, and about the future of the companies that are pushing them? Will one emerge? What will it take for that to happen?

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