IntenseDebate Comments

Description

IntenseDebate Comments enhance and encourage conversation on your blog or website. Custom integration with your WordPress admin panel makes moderation a piece of cake. Comment threading, reply-by-email, user accounts and reputations, comment voting, along with Twitter and friendfeed integrations enrich your readers’ experience and make more of the internet aware of your blog and comments which drives traffic to you!

Full comment and account data sync between Intense Debate and WordPress ensures that you will always have your comments stored locally on your own server.

Note: IntenseDebate is currently being maintained, but not actively developed.

Screenshots

Installation

Note: As is the case when installing any new plugin, it’s always a good idea to backup your blog data before installing.

1. After downloading the IntenseDebate plugin, unpack and upload the file to the wp-content/plugins folder on your blog. Make sure to leave the directory structure of the archive intact so that all of the IntenseDebate files are located in ‘wp-content/plugins/intensedebate/’
2. You will need to activate the IntenseDebate plugin in order to see your new comment system. Go to the Plugins tab and find IntenseDebate Comments in the list and click Activate.
3. After activating proceed to the plugin settings page (under Settings > IntenseDebate) to configure your plugin. Don’t forget to visit your account at IntenseDebate.com for additional customization options.

FAQ

Having Connection Issues During Install?

In order for our plugin to work properly, our servers need to be able to get in contact with yours. Some common causes for communication errors:

1. You’re attempting to install IntenseDebate on a local development server – your site must be online on the “public” internet
2. Your site is password protected (.htaccess or similar)
3. Your server is behind a firewall or
4. A caching plugin might be configured incorrectly

For further assistance, please contact IntenseDebate support at [email protected]

What is data synchronization?

Comments made in IntenseDebate are automatically backed-up to your WordPress comment system, while your existing WordPress comments are automatically imported into IntenseDebate. You always have all of your comments so uninstalling is a one-click process if you change your mind. Syncing your accounts enables auto-login so logging into WordPress automatically logs you into IntenseDebate. Profile sync also means that comments you make are synchronized to both profiles so you maintain ownership of your profile.

What about SEO?

IntenseDebate outputs the standard WordPress comments enabling your comments to still be indexed by search engines that ignore JavaScript, while ensuring that visitors surfing with JavaScript disabled will be able to interact with comments made in IntenseDebate. Readers with JS disabled can comment in the original WP system and those comments will be imported into IntenseDebate.

How do I sync my accounts?

After installing and activating the IntenseDebate plugin you will need to update your account settings in your Plugin Settings page and either create an IntenseDebate account or login to your IntenseDebate account. Your data synchronization and comment import will start as soon as you have successfully logged in.

Please Note:
Your comments may take several hours to import. The time of your import is dependent on how many other import requests we are receiving in addition to how many comments are currently being imported.

Reviews

Will not connect

Brian Keary July 14, 2023

Sounded like a good plugin but it does not connect with your wordpress site after adding the plugin. When trying to login it will always say login failed. I even clicked the create new account and tried and it still failed.

Some problems

doniking February 24, 2023

the plugin was successfuly installed. But then I couldn’t enter the comment section. I registered, the registration email went to spam folder ?? and connect my WP installation with their API, ok now I can go to comment section, but it then still requires me to connect with their API. After connecting for the second time, an error page showed up saying “Connection refused”.

Plugin Icon

Dan Roundhill January 5, 2023

Thanks to whoever added the plugin icon. Much better!

Pity, the project is abandoned

Sabinooo September 3, 2016

My honest opinion, IntenseDebate was something awesome in the start, but sadly Automattic gave up on it, and with every month IntenseDebate is becoming something of the past. Now, there is no way to contact the support team, the development is abandoned, and the number of bugs is growing. I recently checked my website’s apache error log: GAZILLIONS of serious errors caused by incorrect SQL behaviour on the intensedebate end. This was terrible. Time to give up on it, adieu, this is a pity.

Nice, but does not work with Rocket Loader

rafajaques September 3, 2016

The plugin works fine, even with the latest release of WordPress. But it does not work very well (intensedebate login) when using Rocket Loader (JS).

unprofessional comments system

Elmagnifico February 7, 2017

I am so sorry, but i will not let you generate traffic using my site and redirecting my users to your site! this system is for small and trial sites that doesn’t care about their name or reputation, not for sites that cares who visits them, i looked everywhere for an option that lets me disable the ‘view intense database profile’ and it was nowhere to be found! i think it’s really unprofessional to have that, i’m sorry but you don’t deserve more than one star for this move. Uninstalled and forgotten.

Contributors & Developers

Changelog

2.10.2

• Minor improvements.

2.10.1

• Updated documentation to update current plugin compatibility.

2.10.0

• PHP 8.0+ compatibility
• Fix notices and warnings for WordPress 5.5.0+

2.9.11

• Improved security

2.9.10

• Minor fix: Add Tested up to WordPress 5.0 on readme.txt

2.9.9

• Tested up to WordPress 5.0

2.9.8

• Fix possible fatal on php >= 7.1
• Added security hardening

2.9.7

• Change deprecated function calls to more up-to-date alternatives.
• Convert urls to IntenseDebate.com to https
• Added security hardening

2.9.6

• Clean up warnings in WP_DEBUG mode
• Minor cosmetic tweaks to better align with modern wp-admin

2.9.5

• Wrap JS output in an anonymous function to avoid variable conflicts

2.9.4

• Remove some old compatibility code
• Performance optimizations
• Better support for loading via HTTPS

2.9.3

• Remove mentions of $wpmu which is deprecated
• Bump requirement to WP3.0
• Get rid of our JSON library
• Remove Facebook xd receiver file
• Remove no-longer-used reference to Facebook cross-domain receiver
• Update .pot file

2.9.2

• Remove unnecessary reference to wp-admin/includes/template.php
• Import all comments not marked as spam (handles custom statuses etc)

2.9.1

• Remove user account linking/auto-login
• Fix bug with jQuery selectors for jQ 1.5.2 compatibility
• Update links to ID.com admin pages
• Enhance comment moderation experience for WordPress.com users
• Improve styling on comment moderation panel for recent WP versions

2.9

• Now requires WordPress 2.8+
• Reduced query load
• Optimize sync queue system for better performance
• Improved option handling
• Improve mobile device support
• Improved compatibility with WP 3.0

2.8

• Added widgets for recent comments, top commenters, site comment stats, and most commented posts

2.7

• Added ability to explicitly log in as a WordPress.com user
• Added basic connection diagnostics during installation
• More robust detection/loading of JSON libraries

2.6

• Fixed pass-by-reference bug for PHP 5.3, props Maciek P
• Minor modification to the way JSON-compat functions are loaded to work better with WP 2.9 under certain conditions

2.5

• Adjusted sync queue handling to handle bigger queues more reliably
• Removed DB logging entirely
• Added some API functions: get comment counts per post/total, get total approved comments, remotely retrieve queue, remotely cancel an operation, ability to lock queue temporarily
• Load comment details right before sync to avoid stale information syncing
• Improve duplicate comment handling
• Improve comment status syncing
• Fix bug in handling comments being enabled/disabled on a Post/Page
• Throttling on the number of outgoing requests to reduce loads on both ends of the system
• Ability to import a single Post/Page’s comments
• Added partial support for Trash feature in WP 2.9+

2.4.2

• Stopped using the onload JS event to load ID because some people had other plugins/widgets that were clobbering it
• Fixed invalid path on Loading image
• Changed Facebook xd_receiver path to be root-relative
• Fixed 2 NOTICE errors, props Anilo.

2.4.1

• Lots of optimizations on when/where to load ID resources (CSS/JS) to improve page load times
• Switched to inline JS/CSS in the admin to prevent loading the WP engine again
• Now loading ID comment UI via the script object method, rather than direct inclusion
• Removed some unnecessary options and just used smart defaults
• Changed so that there is no backup comments template — your theme MUST have something available, even if it’s very simple
• Made the option to reset the plugin available before import was completed
• Added the ability to reset your import any time during the installation process if you’re having problems
• Standardized on no-www for URLs
• Reversed the order of comment imports (starts oldest first now)
• Added Ping/Pong for network diagnostics
• Cleaned up translatable strings and now shipping with a POT file for translations
• Improved comment count links within wp-admin
• Updated some screenshots
• Now using a stable tag, rather than trunk, in the wp.org plugins directory
• Made syncing more flexible when handling different timezones
• Now packaging Facebook xd_receiver ready for future functionality

2.3

• Fixed bug where a blank blog title would prevent authentication with ID
• Switched to using PHP native json_* functions where available to increase performance
• Limited size of outgoing requests to speed up comms and avoid maxing out request/response sizes
• Added tag to error_log info for easier debugging

2.2

• Fixed bug where versions of WP < 2.7 would turn off comment threading when saving Discussion Settings
• Improved performance of queue system (reduced DB hits)
• Improved overall compatibility with WPMU (props to Israel S. for contributed code!)
• Improved debugging/logging options/output
• Cleaned up/standardized use of constants
• Improved initial import process
• Improved security of the options page
• Fixed WP 2.8 JavaScript compatibility bug
• Improved syncing of comment moderations
• Improved translatability

2.1.1

• Fixed bug with initial import process introduced in 2.1

2.1

• Introduced moderation/discussion settings sync
• Improved integration of moderation panel
• Optimized moderation panel to load faster
• Fixed bug where you were logged out of ID if you saved your WP profile page
• Moved to WordPress coding style