Here at Intense Debate we’re growing quickly…so quickly in fact that we’re looking for a couple new additions to our team. We’re based in Boulder, CO and participated in the TechStars program this past summer. We’re looking to fill 3 new positions, a brief description of each follows:

Technology Evangelist (full time)

We’re seeking a real web maniac who enjoys reaching out to publishers and engaging them in conversations about how to make our product better for them.
The ideal candidate will be a strong communicator, web savvy, and be capable of handling basic technical support for our important customers.

Software Engineer (full time)

We are looking for an outstandingly talented developer with an in-depth knowledge of PHP and Javascript. You must be fast, flexible, and very self-motivated, and have a passion for startups! Familiarity with blogs/blogging and MySQL databases are pluses.

Bookkeeper / Accountant (part time)

See the full description here.

If you’re interested in any of these roles please email us at jobs@intensedebate.com.  Also be sure to keep an eye on our new jobs page to see these and future postings.

Come join our team, and be a part of this exciting adventure, as we build the best comment system on the web!

Today we’ve got a bunch of exciting new stuff for you. We’ve gone through and revamped our comment system, it is now faster, prettier, more usable, and easier to understand. Let us highlight some of the things that are new/changed.

User information box

The menu button is gone, but we’ve replaced it with something much better. Say hello to what we call the “userbox”, a popup that appears when you hover a person’s avatar. It has all the information you need in it: Ways of contacting the person on other sites, a link to their Intense Debate profile, and a personal message that gives you more information about the person. It’s all about giving your commenters an identity. Go ahead, let the world know who you are! It’s easily done on your “Edit profile” page.

Comment system redesign

We’re all about user feedback and improving over time. We saw that the comment system had become too cluttered, and so we cleaned up the structure and gave it a new appearance. We want to make sure that your blog has got the most sleek, useful, and cool comment system around. We’ve raised the bar again.

Post new comment section

While we’re all about improving, some of you felt like the “Post new comment” section was a bit too different from the ones seen on standard blog platforms these days. To help new commenters, and to give the comment system an even cleaner look, we’ve taken it back to the roots. You’ll now find that the fields for credentials are stacked on top of each other.

Intense Debate has never looked better. Look out, though. We’re not even close to being done.

Today we’re happy to announce the newest member to the Intense Debate team, Tom Keller.  Tom joins us as our new CEO and we look forward to working with him.   Here’s a brief bio from the about us page.

Tom has more than 20 years’ experience in finance and high tech. Prior to joining IntenseDebate, Tom served as CEO at ClickCaster, where he helped reposition the company and guide it to profitability. Previously, Tom founded and was President and CEO of Net Infrastructure Corporation for 6 years. Tom holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science degree from the University of Washington, and a Master of Science degree in Engineering-Economic Systems from Stanford University.

Glad to have you as part of the team Tom.  We’ve got a lot of exciting things to announce in the coming weeks, so be sure to subscribe to this blog if you haven’t already.

Here at Intense Debate, customer support and feedback are both extremely important to us.  As such we’re happy to announce that we’ve switched to a new system for our forums.  We’ll now be using Satisfaction as our forum system for customer support, feedback, or just to talk about Intense Debate.  It offers many advantages and we hope it will provide a better experience to our users when trying to find answers to their questions or leave feedback to help us improve our comment system.  We’ll still keep the old forums around though in case anyone prefers that or wants to see past discussions.  Please give it a try and let us know how you feel about it.

Today we’re happy to announce another release, although this one probably won’t be as noticeable as some in the past.  Last night we released a completely rewritten loading system for our comments.  We’ve also completely redone our caching procedures, upgraded our infrastructure, and even optimized our server configurations a bit.  So what does all this mean?  Well, it’s all geared toward making the comments load faster than ever before.  You should start seeing noticeable improvements in our comment system’s load time.

Also, something that is a little more obvious is the addition of the sorting options to the comment system.  You can now sort by date (like a more traditional comment system would), comment rating (what it’s always done up till now), and most recent activity, which orders them by putting the most recent comments at the top, making it easier than ever to keep track of how the conversation is progressing and organize the comments how you want them.

We’ve got a lot of changes in progress right now and lots of exciting things happening in the next few weeks…we’ll let you know as it unfolds.

Today we are announcing that Josh is leaving Intense Debate for personal reasons.  We all feel this is what’s best for both Intense Debate and Josh. We certainly wish him well in his future pursuits.

Losing a team member in a small startup like ours is obviously never easy, but we remain committed to providing the best tool for online conversation to all of our users.

We’ve got some really exciting stuff in the pipeline, so keep checking back for the latest news.

We’ve got several new things we’ve rolled out today.  Probably the first thing you’ll notice is this blog’s redesign.  This new look matches the rest of our site better and puts a new shine on this blog.

Another recent update is to the forums.  We’ve done several changes to help speed up the load time as well as offer new options for sorting to make it easier to find what you’re looking for.  You can expect to see these sorting options rolled out to blogs shortly.

And finally, a few things you may or may not notice are several bug fixes that have been released.  The issues with comments that couldn’t be found to be deleted as well as some issues with multiple posts should be resolved among others.

As always, feel free to give us your feedback in the forums or by email (contactus@intensedebate.com).