We’ve been hard at work on some very cool projects, and I thought I’d share some details of one of the things I’ve been working on.  Our FAQ has become pretty dated – we’ve made loads of changes to IntenseDebate since we first put that together – and one of my projects has been to beef-up our support documentation to help you get answers to your questions easily.  We’ll be launching our shiny new FAQ soon.

While our goal is to make IntenseDebate as intuitive as possible, we realize that offering robust support documentation is key to helping you get up and running with your new comment system and commenter profile as quickly as possible.  I’ve answered thousands of support emails which have helped us identify ways to improve IntenseDebate (nearly all of our user-interface updates and new features are based on your feedback), and that’s also helped craft our new FAQ entries.

IntenseDebate is nothing without our community, so there’s no question that you all are the most important part of our team.  With that in mind, I’d love your feedback on your experience with IntenseDebate:

How was your initial experience with IntenseDebate?
Were there certain parts that you were confused about?
What helped you get familiar with it?
What would have improved your experience?
What can we add to our FAQ to help?

Whether you’ve installed IntenseDebate on your blog or you use your user account to comment on your favorite sites, your feedback is extremely important to us and we’d love to hear more.  Please leave us a comment below and help us improve our FAQ for future IntenseDebate users.

Thanks in advance!

Posted by Michael Koenig in community,feedback

At long last the wait for Right-To-Left text in IntenseDebate is over!  We’re also stoked to introduce 9 new translations for your comment section. Without further ado, here are our new languages and the awesome folks who translated them:

• Dutch – Mark Kater
• Finnish – Juhani Heiskanen
• Hebrew – Matthew Ellis, Yoav Farhi
• Indonesian -Teguh
• Japanese – Atsushi Matsuura, Naoko McCracken
• Norwegian Bokmål – Stig Morten Myre
• Portuguese (PT) – Zé Fontainhas
• Romanian – Bogdan Andronic
• Vietnamese – Huân H

Hats off to all of our volunteers for their hard work, and many thanks to Yoav and Beau for their work on RTL – it was a major undertaking and we couldn’t have done it without them.

IntenseDebate is now available in 33 languages that are available in your account at http://intensedebate.com/edit-site-account:

Arabic	Dutch	German	Malay	Russian	Turkish
Bulgarian	English	Hebrew	Norwegian Bokmål	Slovak	Ukrainian
Catalan	Estonian	Indonesian	Polish	Slovene	Vietnamese
Croatian	Filipino	Italian	Portuguese (BR)	Spanish (LA)
Czech	Finnish	Japanese	Portuguese (PT)	Spanish (ES)
Danish	French	Lithuanian	Romanian	Swedish

We also have 18 other translations that are nearly ready for prime-time, but we need your help with reviewing them. If you’re interested please send me a note at labs@intensedebate.com.

Afrikaans	Chinese	Hindi	Korean	Maltese	Swahili
Albanian	Galician	Hungarian	Latvian	Persian (Farsi)	Tagalog
Belarusian	Greek	Icelandic	Macedonian	Serbian	Thai

Don’t see your language? Give us a hand!
If you’re interested in getting involved, now is the perfect time. Please email us at labs@intensedebate.com for information. Thanks! We’re also going to be updating all of our translations in the near future to keep them up to date with the full set of strings in use on IntenseDebate, so if you helped out previously, keep an eye out for an email soon!

Posted by Michael Koenig in community,features

We are extremely excited to introduce WordPress.com user accounts and auto-login to IntenseDebate and open up the debate to more than 12 million commenters and bloggers.  Now WordPress.com users can comment on IntenseDebate-enabled websites anywhere on the Web without having to re-enter their account information.

While we’ve added Facebook Connect and Twitter Sign-In support, there are still too many steps and mouse clicks between you and posting a comment. We’re all about making commenting easier and more accessible to as many people as possible, and we think you’ll agree that this is a huge leap forward.  Commenting with IntenseDebate is now easier, faster, and simpler.

WordPress.com users post nearly 400,000 new comments every day, and now they are all automatically logged in to comment on your blog. And that’s not to mention the addition of over 20,000 new users every day!

So what does this mean for you?

• If you’re a WordPress.com user and you’re logged into your account, then you’ll automatically be logged into IntenseDebate as well.  All you have to do is type your comment and hit submit.
• You can login with your WordPress.com account directly from the comment section and at IntenseDebate.com.
• If you already have an IntenseDebate account then you can just keep on commenting as normal.

This means that unlike Facebook Connect and Twitter Sign-In, there are no extra clicks, and no need to remember another set of login credentials. It also means that more than 12 million WordPress.com users will be able to comment on your blog with full-fledged IntenseDebate profiles, without having to create an account or enter any details. How’s that for motivating the conversation?

Better yet, since these profiles aren’t third-party accounts, you (and all your new users) will have access to all of the awesome features that IntenseDebate is famous for: email notifications, reply-by-email, reputation scores, comment voting, comment history, Twitter integration, and more.

If you already have both IntenseDebate and WordPress.com accounts, don’t worry – we will be merging your accounts in the next phase of our integration, so keep commenting!

Commenting on your site just got a whole lot easier for millions of existing bloggers and commenters.

Welcome to the debate WordPress.com lovers!

Posted by Michael Koenig in community,features,News

WordCamp Boston is tomorrow, and I’m on my way out to the East Coast to attend (and try some New England clam chowder). If you’re in the Boston area or are planning on attending WordCamp, drop me a line on Twitter to meetup. I’ve got swanky new IntenseDebate stickers for your laptop!

In case you’re not familiar with it:

WordCamp is a conference that focuses on everything WordPress. WordCamps are informal, community-organized events that are put together by WordPress users like you. Everyone from casual users to core developers participate, share ideas, and get to know each other. WordCamps are open to WordPress.com and WordPress.org users alike.

Posted by Michael Koenig in community

Exciting news!  We have 22 newly translated languages that are nearly ready for prime-time, but we need your help.  We used a Google Translate tool to generate them, and we’re looking for volunteers to review these translations for any grammatical and contextual errors.  If you’re interested, please email us at labs@intensedebate.com and we’ll send you the translation along with some instructions. Thanks!

Translations to be reviewed:

Afrikaans	Finnish	Hungarian	Latvian	Portuguese (PT)	Tagalog
Albanian	Galician	Icelandic	Macedonian	Romanian	Thai
Belarusian	Greek	Indonesian	Maltese	Serbian
Chinese	Hindi	Korean	Persian	Swahili

We offer 24 translations that are currently available in your account at http://intensedebate.com/edit-site-account:

Arabic	Czech	Filipino	Lithuanian	Russian	Spanish (ES)
Bulgarian	Danish	French	Malay	Slovak	Swedish
Catalan	English	German	Polish	Slovene	Turkish
Croatian	Estonian	Italian	Portuguese (BR)	Spanish (LA)	Ukrainian

And we have a few translations that are nearing completion: Dutch, Hebrew, Japanese, Norwegian Bokmål, and Vietnamese.

Don’t see your language? Give us a hand!
If you’re interested in getting involved, now is the perfect time! Please email us at labs@intensedebate.com for information. Thanks!

Posted by Michael Koenig in community,features