Many noticed that I removed the Disqus comment service last week. I did that primarily because I upgraded to Wordpress 2.7 and wanted to get a feel for what Wordpress was doing with comments recently.
That said, my loyalty to Disqus is waning because of how they handle my few posts with a large number of comments. I have one post with more than 1500 comments, and after upgrading to the newest Disqus wordpress plugin that imported all old comments, that post was causing Internet Explorer to hang.
Enabling Disqus’ paging resolves the problem, but I don’t love their paging implementation. There is just prev and next links with no ability to jump around, or to the end. That’s a real problem when there are dozens and dozens of pages.
I love the guys at Disqus, their responsiveness and how engaged they are with the community. But business is business and I need to look at other solutions.
I was actually enjoying being back on Wordpress comments for a few days, but decided this would be a great time to test out IntenseDebate again. I took a good hard look at IntenseDebate vs. Disqus almost a year ago and the big show-stopper was that it was Javascript only. That meant that comments were not visible to search engines.
Since then, they’ve made huge strides, in addition to being bought up by Automattic (Wordpress) and have released a Wordpress plugin that gets the comments sync’ed with Wordpress and serves them up server-side.
It’s interesting that I rarely see IntenseDebate in our Social Media and Internet Marketing circles. It’s all Disqus.
Well here’s one brick in the wall for IntenseDebate.
If this is your first look at IntenseDebate, feel free to use the comments here to try it out. Sign up to get the full experience.
Let me know what you think.
