A little while ago we asked for your feedback on what you like about IntenseDebate and what you’d like to see moving forward. Of the survey results we received, Twitter Sign-in is the most requested feature with 52.3% of the vote. Localization came in second with 30.9% and Google Friend Connect in third with 16.8%.

With that in mind, we’re excited to introduce Twitter Sign-in integration with IntenseDebate! Now when you enable Twitter Sign-in, your readers will have the option to leave a comment using their Twitter login info. This feature is located in your Blog Settings tab in your IntenseDebate account.

To enable Twitter Sign-in login > select the tab named after your site > select the Settings tab > Twitter Sign-in is located just above Facebook Connect at the bottom left.

We received some excellent feedback on other ways to improve IntenseDebate (aside from localization and Google Friend Connect). Below are the top 3 additional admin feature requests we received. While we’re currently setting our sights on finishing up some other projects, we’re interested in what you think about these ideas. Your input is greatly appreciated. Please take a moment and choose the feature that you think would be most useful. Thanks!

If you haven’t given IntenseDebate a try yet, there’s no better time than now! Get started with IntenseDebate.

Facebook Connect integration for your IntenseDebate comment section is now up, running, and open for business! We’ve worked with the Facebook team to tighten up the integration and make it as slick as possible in true IntenseDebate style.

To enable Facebook Connect in your IntenseDebate comment section please visit your blog Settings page in your IntenseDebate account. Login, select the tab named after your blog, then the Settings tab – the option is located at the bottom left. Please follow the instructions and you’ll be all set!

If you haven’t given IntenseDebate a try yet, there’s no better time than now! Get started with IntenseDebate.

It’s that time again folks; time for an update to the WordPress plugin. Version 2.3 features several updates that correspond to a lot of work we’ve been doing on our end to improve performance, make importing more robust and generally improve your experience. Here are the details from the Changelog (which now appears in the WordPress plugin directory!).

1. Fixed a bug where if you didn’t have a blog title configured in WordPress, you wouldn’t be able to authenticate with IntenseDebate to set up the plugin,
2. Switched to using PHP native json_* functions where available to increase performance
3. Limited the size of outgoing sync requests to speed up communication between blogs and intensedebate.com and avoid maxing out request/response sizes (on both ends)
4. Added a tag to the error_log info for easier debugging/filtering.

We have a lot planned for the next version of the plugin, most of which is based on feedback from you all out there. Work has already begun on v2.4 and we’ll get it into your hands as soon as possible. You should get an upgrade notice for v2.3 in your WordPress admin panel soon, if you haven’t got it already.

If you haven’t started using IntenseDebate on your WordPress website yet, there’s no time like the present: Get started now and enhance your comments!

We’re trying some new things on our end, and we’d like to get you in on it. As we continue to optimize our backend and UI, we’d like to get your feedback on what you’d like to see in IntenseDebate. We value your opinion and we want to develop features that you want, so let us know (it’s so much easier than guessing!).

We will be announcing Facebook Connect integration shortly (we’re ironing out FBC & Safari 4 integration), so please don’t request it because it’s right around the corner.

We’ve put together a PollDaddy survey and we’d love it if you took a minute to give us some feedback. Many thanks!

We’ve been working away on a new version of the IntenseDebate Plugin for WordPress, and now it’s ready to come your way. This version contains a bunch of improvements and enhancements, mostly on the backend, and is also WordPress 2.8 compatible. Here’s the full list of changes, which is now included as a Changelog in the readme file included with the plugin (and which can be seen in the WordPress Plugin Directory):

1. Compatible with WordPress 2.5 – 2.8
2. Fixed a bug where versions of WordPress below 2.7 would turn off comment threading in IntenseDebate when saving Discussion Settings in WordPress
3. Improved performance of the queue system used to sync details back and forth with IntenseDebate (reduced the number of database requests made significantly)
4. Improved overall compatibility with WordPressMU (and props to Israel S. for contributed code!). Compatible WordPressMU 2.6 and 2.7.
5. Improved debugging/logging options (you can now save debug details to your error log, database or both)
6. Improved the initial import process (and there are some more improvements coming on this one)
7. Improved security of the options page via better use of nonces and whitelisted options within WordPress (where available)
8. Improved syncing of comment moderations
9. Improved translatability so that we can get the plugin localized into other languages!

So as you can see, there’s a lot more in there than just WordPress 2.8 compatibility. In amongst all of this, there have also been a number of small improvements to the way that IntenseDebate interacts with WordPress and presents information to you while you are moderating comments.

If you’re using WordPress 2.5 or higher, or WordPressMU 2.6 or higher, we strongly recommend that you upgrade to this new version to get all the latest goodness!

If you haven’t started using IntenseDebate on your WordPress website yet, there’s no time like the present: Get started now and enhance your comments!

Big news! We’re migrating our avatar system over to Gravatar! We’re all part of the Automattic family and Gravatar has it down, so as the saying goes, “why recreate the wheel?” This is going to be a gradual process so don’t panic.

What is a gravatar?

A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an image that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things. Avatars help identify your posts on blogs and web forums, so why not on any site?

We’ve rolled out the first steps of this process. We now check to see if you have a gravatar and if you do, we’ll automatically use it. If you are using an IntenseDebate avatar instead of your gravatar then you’ll notice a change (unless your gravatar and IntenseDebate avatar are the same!). Our apologies for the inconvenience.

Next up, you might have noticed the blue message in your IntenseDebate account prompting you to verify your email address. This is to make sure you are who you say you are. If you haven’t verified your email address yet, please go ahead and do so.

We’ll keep you posted on the next phases of this project. If you haven’t discovered Gravatar yet, check it out and create your own!

We’re excited to introduce two new plugins: AddToAny Share Buttons for both your comments and your posts!  Enabling AddToAny Share Buttons lets your readers share, save, bookmark, and email comments using any service, such as Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Twitter, and over 100 more social bookmarking and sharing sites.

Enable AddToAny Share Buttons on your blog by visiting your Plugins page and select the Activate link next to the plugin.  And don’t forget to check out our other plugins like PollDaddy polls, Seesmic video comments, YouTube, and Smileys.  The AddToAny Share Buttons plugins were developed by our friend Pat, who helps run AddToAny blog share buttons.

Interested in flexing your own coding muscles and developing a super-sweet plugin?  Check out our Plugin Resources and documentation.  You can also check out our Plugins blog post to find out more information.

Many thanks to Pat and his team for their phenomenal work and addition to IntenseDebate!

You guys have helped IntenseDebate grow a huge amount over the past few months. Overall this is great! We love helping people take the conversation on their blog / website to the next level, and of course once you get IntenseDebate going you know you grow even faster.  It has put quite a strain on our systems though.  I’m sure you’re all aware of our outages over the last few weeks.

We’ve been working non-stop to address these issues. Our highest priority is improving the performance and long term scalability of IntenseDebate for you.

Now we could leave it at that, be completely opaque about what changes we’re doing and just hope that you’ll trust that we’re working hard on the problem, but you all deserve more and need to trust that our service can perform for you.  So here’s a behind-the-scenes peek for those of you interested in how we’re tackling this problem.

The first major change we’ve been working on is sharding some of our larger and most frequently used tables into a more efficient and scalable database schema.  For those of you not familiar with sharding it means storing all your data in several smaller tables instead of one large monolithic table.  This allows us to get your data much more quickly and makes for a much more horizontally scalable system. (We can continue to add more tables to keep them small as our total data storage increases.)  This is complete for our most heavily used data, comments, and will continue where appropriate.

The second change is creating more summary tables to simplify the retrieval of common data.  Even after sharding some of the data is still too slow to compute on-the-fly.  Summary tables cache frequently used computations which will allow us to get this information almost instantly.

Last, but not least, we’re optimizing our logging and background processing.  We do quite a bit of logging to ensure things are running  smoothly and to help debug quickly when things don’t.  In particular the syncing process to and from WordPress blogs has a lot of activity we store for troubleshooting.  We’ve done some work to make this logging faster and less system heavy, as well as some fine tuning of what and when we log in order to help ensure that these troubleshooting tools don’t have a negative impact on the performance of the core service.

I want to reiterate we’re acutely aware of performance over the last few weeks and there is no excuse for poor service or performance.  We’ve fixed the most pressing issues, but we’re taking a number of proactive steps to ensure that we can maintain the level of service that you deserve from us.  Thank you all for your patience and understanding.

We’ve rolled out some cool changes to your User Menu!  Ever notice that when you hover your mouse cursor over a user’s profile picture, their User Menu drops down displaying links to their profile, blogs, and more?  Well the User Menus just got a whole lot more useful!

Not only do they look super-sweet, they also present higher quality info right up front, while minimizing the footprint.  Now you can quickly learn about your fellow commenters.  We’ve got some more changes to the comment section coming soon.

So what’s new in the User Menu?

• Profile Picture now blows-up so you can get a good look at it.
• Reputation Score is included.
• User Description & Latest Tweet are both there so you don’t have to choose one or the other.
• Slick New Look

So now when you hover her avatar you’ll get a better look at miss Swann and learn more about her all at the same time!  Not too shabby!

If you haven’t given IntenseDebate a try yet, there’s no better time than now!  Get started with IntenseDebate.

Hi everyone, my name is Beau and I’ve been working with the guys here at IntenseDebate to improve their WordPress plugin and its syncing functionality. I’ve been using the WP plugin myself since last year (check out my public IntenseDebate profile!) so it’s been really great to be able to work with the team here and help improve a service that I’m personally a big fan of. WordPress has become a major part of my personal and professional life, so I’m happy that the integration between IntenseDebate and WordPress is constantly improving.

We’ve been hard at work updating the IntenseDebate service and finding out what folks like you would like to see from us. One of the biggest requests we’ve had for the WordPress Plugin is to sync moderation settings between your WordPress blog and IntenseDebate. Well, ask and ye shall receive!

Syncing Discussion/Moderation Settings
The biggest new feature in this version is that all relevant discussion/moderation settings (words/email addresses/IPs that cause a comment to go to moderation or be blacklisted, email notification options etc) will now be synced between your WordPress blog and your IntenseDebate control panel. This means that you can use either of them to make changes, and they will automatically update each other.

In addition to that, we’ve done a lot of code cleanup and some other backend tweaks to make things run more smoothly. We’ve also improved the integration with your WordPress Admin Panel for comment moderation. That panel should load faster now as well thanks to some optimizations we’ve implemented. Did you ever notice that if you saved your WordPress profile information, you’d have to log back into IntenseDebate again? Not anymore, that one got fixed as well.

Install/Upgrade
If you’re installing the plugin for the first time, it will ask you if you’d like to merge your moderation settings with IntenseDebate, right after you log into your account:

We recommend that you leave that box checked, which will add our default spam-catching naughty-words to any that you might have set up in WordPress already. Once you have the new plugin installed, things should automatically start syncing between the two systems whenever you make a change to your moderation settings.

If you already have a previous version of the IntenseDebate plugin installed, you should see an upgrade reminder appear in your Admin Panel soon. If not (or if you prefer to do these things manually), you can download the plugin from the WordPress Plugin Directory now.

Once you’re finished upgrading you’ll need to trigger a sync to make sure things get started properly. Log into IntenseDebate and go to the “Settings” page for your blog. Add a single space character to the “Moderate posts containing the following words” box and hit “Save settings”. Your IntenseDebate settings will now be synced over to WordPress and things will stay in sync from now on.

Thinking about giving IntenseDebate a try? There’s no better time than the now! Get started with IntenseDebate!

UPDATE

We have identified and fixed an issue with the importer.  Please update your plugin to version 2.1.1.   You should have an upgrade message in your WP plugins panel. If you don’t please download the plugin here.