After an Intense Debate, I’m Back on Disqus

Let me start by saying that both of these services are great and I value the work they have done and continue to do. I would recommend either to someone looking for a hosted commenting system.

I had originally switched from Disqus to Intense Debate because ID imports comments from FriendFeed. Disqus has been talking about this feature for quite a while now, but it still doesn’t exist. I’m a FriendFeed fanatic. I need this type of integration. The FriendFeed comments plugin has been my main standby for this, but I crave an all-in-one solution.

ZOMG! Where are my comments?!

I was alerted by @nukirk on Twitter that all of my comments had disappeared from my post on the Blackbird browser. Now, as you can see, I do not have a huge blog. I do not get much traffic and I don’t really get many comments, so it was highly unacceptable for all of the comments to disappear from one of my most discussed posts. I tried frantically to restore my missing discussion. After resetting the Intense Debate plugin, disabling WP-SuperCache and everything else I could think of, I just ended up getting rid of Intense Debate entirely.

To their credit, Intense Debate did respond to me on Twitter (sorry, it was 3am EST. I had already fell asleep). I didn’t actually lose my comments due to their data synchronization feature. Once I got rid of the plug-in, my comments were safe and intact within my WordPress database. There was just no way to get the comments to display within the Intense Debate commenting interface. 

To this day, I have no idea what happened

All I could do was install Disqus again and go on about my business. I replied back to the ID guys the next day, but received no response. I had already made the switch anyway. Plus, Disqus welcomed me back with open arms. I mean, what else could I do? I never really wanted to leave Disqus in the first place and Daniel and Giannii have always been more than willing to jump in and help me, even when I was trying to get rid of their service back in November :).

So, Back to square one

I like Disqus, but I would like it even better if they integrated FriendFeed comments. Facebook Connect and Seesmic integration is pretty cool, though. I guess for now, I’ll be investigating this FF2Disqus thing.