It’s been way too long since we last updated our blog – our apologies for the radio silence. I wanted to share a handy bit of CSS to help you further customize the way your readers can post comments to your site. While we offer a couple of different ways to comment – as a guest or using their Facebook, Twitter, WordPress.com, or IntenseDebate account – there wasn’t a way to disable guest commenting while still enabling Facebook Connect and Twitter Sign-in.

But, as you may know, we offer a super-easy way to add custom CSS to bring your own personal style to IntenseDebate through your Custom CSS page. By adding a handy snippet of CSS, you can hide the guest commenter information fields (Name, Email, URL), which will effectively remove the option to post comments as a guest.

Why is this cool?

I’m glad you asked. Currently commenters that post using Facebook Connect and Twitter Sign-in are considered guest commenters since they aren’t posting with an IntenseDebate or WordPress.com account. The issue is that if you disable guest commenting in your moderation settings by requiring readers to have an IntenseDebate or WordPress.com account, you would remove the options to post using Facebook Connect and Twitter Sign-in, which isn’t ideal.

So without further ado, here’s the CSS you can add to your Custom CSS page to get rid of guest commenting:

#idc-container-parent #idc-container .idc-postnav-label,
#idc-container-parent #idc-container .idc-c-m.idc-signup {
display: none !important;
}
#idc-container-parent #idc-container
.idc-postnav-list {
margin: 5px 0 8px;
}

That last little bit adjusts the margin to make up for the hidden fields so there isn’t a gaping space where the guest commenter fields used to be. Feel free to tweak that as you’d like.

Make sure you check out our CSS documentation, along with the rest of our guides to change the font size; text, background, and link colors; width of the comment section; and move the comment box to the top of the comment section.

Posted by Michael Koenig in features

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’ve received a lot of requests recently to move the comment form to the top of the comment section rather than having it at the bottom. We prefer having the comment form at the bottom so your visitors have a chance to catch-up on the debate before posting their comment – that helps cut down on duplicate comments and encourages interaction. But it’s your site and we’re all about customization!

To make it happen, you need to add the following CSS to your Custom CSS page in your IntenseDebate account:

#idc-container-parent #idc-container {
position: relative;
padding-top: 320px;
}

#idc-container-parent #idc-container #IDCommentsNewThreadCover {
position: absolute;
top: 0;
left: 0;
width: 100%;
}

For more CSS help, check out our CSS Documentation and feel free to give us a shout at support@intensedebate.com with any questions. Oh, and don’t forget to check out our other styling tips to simplify your comment section design!

Posted by Michael Koenig in features

Today we’re excited to announce the addition of not 5, not 10, but 16 new button options for your IntenseDebate comment system. This project has been a long in the making, and these new styles are now available in your Layout Settings page at http://intensedebate.com/edit-site-layout. There are 4 main button styles (apart from the normal text links): Default, Candy, Glass, and Square. Each style features some color and size variations, so you should be able to find something that fits nicely with your site’s theme.

Without further ado, we present the latest from our design labs:

Default

This is our beloved default button that’s in use across all IntenseDebate comment sections. We’ve introduced a twist with some new size variation: you can choose to only show large buttons.

Candy

Candy is the coolest of the cool when it comes to our new buttons. With 12 different color variations (in common colors ) there’s something for everyone. Our personal favorites include White, Light Blue (which is actually IntenseDebate-blue), Orange, and Green. You’ll actually find a similar button design around IntenseDebate.com – that’s how much we like them!

Glass

Glass is the classy choice. Available in White and Black, it’s a slick alternative to our flashy new Candy buttons. Glass buttons are designed to resemble clear or smoked glass.

Square

For those of you that might want something a bit more square, we now offer a variation to the Default buttons which features small rounded corners. It’s perfect if you don’t want your button too big, or don’t want it to stand out too much.

Head on over to your Blog Layout page to check out the new buttons and activate them.

Posted by Isaac Keyet in features

Our Plugins API is seeing a lot of activity now, and we’re pleased to announce the release of the new Blog Tweets plugin.  Developed by Vivek Puri, the Blog Tweets plugin uses LinksAlpha to aggregate Tweets linking to your blog post in your IntenseDebate comments section.  Blog Tweets will show up to 20 Tweets in your comments section – pretty cool!

Aggregating Tweets linking to your blog can help provide a more holistic view of the conversation going on about your posts.  This has been a popular feature request, and we’re really excited about Vivek’s work.

About the plugin:

When you activate the plugin, LinksAlpha.com indexes your blog feed and scours Twitter for related Tweets that link back to your post. This includes Tweets that link to your post using URL shortening services like bit.ly.

There is a 5-10 minute period for your post to be indexed by LinksAlpha, which means there will be a slight delay for Tweets to start showing up in your comments section.

Also, when the plugin hits the Twitter API it is likely that Twitter will only return results for recent posts, so Tweets about your older posts won’t necessarily show up.

All Tweets are displayed just below the comment section under the header, “Social Trackbacks,” so Tweets won’t interrupt the comment stream.

Like all IntenseDebate plugins, adding advanced features to your comment section is a piece of cake: just visit your Plugins Page at http://intensedebate.com/plugins, and select “Activate” next to the plugin. That’s all! There’s no additional code for you to manually install, so there’s no need to get your hands dirty messing around with your template.

Please keep in mind that activating plugins for your IntenseDebate comments means that additional code will be loading in your comments section, which may impact load times (especially if you’re running loads of our cool plugins 😉 ).

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

Posted by Michael Koenig in features