After an Intense Debate, I’m Back on Disqus

Intense Debate and Disqus   

Intense Debate and Disqus (Image by inky via Flickr)

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.

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