One of our ongoing projects has been revamping all of the useful pages in your account at IntenseDebate.com.  We’ll be the first to admit it, there’s a ton of awesome features in your profile but they need to be better organized so you can find them all!  We don’t want you to be overwhelmed with too many sudden changes, so we’ve been rolling out small changes over the past several weeks, some of which have likely gone unnoticed, until now…

We have released two major changes. The first is our stylish new home page at IntenseDebate.com. Since you have to be logged out of your IntenseDebate account in order to see the front page (click here to logout), you might not have noticed that one. But, the next change you will undoubtedly notice when you’re logged into your account, and that’s your shiny new Edit Profile page.

So what’s new?
It’s all about the layout. On our old profile pages we just crammed in as much as we could. We would release new features like our Twitter integration (tweet this & latest tweets) or our Gravatar support and we would squeeze it into the old page. Now we’ve organized it a bit more sensibly.  In your Profile Panel you’ll find the following:

• Account Page: here you can manage your basic account settings like your username, email address, OpenID, password, and email notification options.
• User Profile Page: your display name, profile description, and your personal websites (linked to in your profile) are all located here.
• User Picture: manage your Gravatar or IntenseDebate avatar.
• Services: this is where you can manage all of your 3rd party services that you link to in your profile, as well as your Twitter account integration.

We think you’ll agree that this is a major improvement.  Hats off to Isaac and Jon for their work!  Keep an eye for more changes as we continue to make our way across IntenseDebate.com. 🙂

Posted by Michael Koenig in features

Wow, you’ve really answered our call for help with translating IntenseDebate.  In just 1 week we have received 49 volunteers translating IntenseDebate into 26 languages!  And even cooler yet, Dutch, French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, and European Spanish translations have come in for review by your fellow Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiønër’s!

So far this has been one of the most rewarding projects I’ve had the opportunity to be involved with.  There are so many moving parts, it’s beautiful to see everyone coming together.  Several languages have drawn numerous volunteers, and our Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiønër’s are collaborating and exchanging .po files from across the world.  It’s super-cool to watch.  🙂

Here’s a sneak-peek at the French translation in action:

There’s still a lot that needs to be accomplished on our end before we can roll these translations out for use, but thanks to your help we’re making major progress!  Please keep the translations coming!

So far we’ve received volunteers to help translate these languages:

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. Ideally we’d like to have at least two Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiønër’s working together for each translation.  Thanks!

Posted by Michael Koenig in features,News

Brilliant comments have been submitted across IntenseDebate.  But once in a blue moon someone submits a great comment that’s perfect except there’s a typo or a curse word containing non-alphabetic ch@racter$ that slipped through your profanity filter!  Unfortunately when this happened the only available options were to leave the comment up or delete it.  Until now…

We’re extremely excited to introduce the latest enhancement to your IntenseDebate comments, Admin Comment Editing.

Now you can edit the details of all comments on all posts on your site (if you’re a site admin of course).  No more letting your users run wild, unless you’re into that sort of thing. 😉

Comment Edit links are located in two different places in your account at IntenseDebate.com: your Moderation page, and your Comment History page (for editing comments that have already been posted).  If you are using our WordPress Plugin, you will find a link to edit comments in your WordPress admin panel.

Please note: you will not be able to edit user info for authenticated comments (like those posted using an IntenseDebate, Twitter, or Facebook account).

We built this feature based on your feedback, so keep it coming.  We’ve always got an eye out for cool ideas and we’re always listening, so please feel free to share your thoughts with us.  If you haven’t given IntenseDebate a try yet, there’s no better time than now.  Get started!

Posted by Michael Koenig in features

Hello, Hola, Olá, Shalom, Bom dia, Bonjour, Ni hao, Konnichiwa, Hallo, God dag, Guten Tag, Kalimera, Buon giorno, Merhaba, As-Salāmu `Alaykum, G’day!!!

IntenseDebate is open for translation!  That’s right, you can finally translate IntenseDebate into your own language! Localization is by far the most requested feature, and we’re extremely excited to open up the debate.

But you can’t flip the switch just yet. We need your help!  This is a call for all Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiønër’s.  While we continue working on our own translations, we’re also looking for all of you brilliant multilingual folks out there to lend us a hand and help translate IntenseDebate.   If you’re interested please email us at labs@intensedebate.com and we’ll send you instructions. Once we’ve got a few translations we will make them available, and you’ll be able to activate them in your IntenseDebate blog account. Please keep an eye out for future posts detailing our progress.

Thanks!

Posted by Michael Koenig in features

We’d like to share some thoughts and get your feedback.

Our goal with IntenseDebate is to make your comments better.  We offer a system that encourages conversation, and improves your ability to have meaningful dialogue with your readers and fellow commenters.  Comments are the icing on your content cake, and there’s real value and insight in comment sections (the icing is the best part!).  That’s why being able to find valuable comments is key.

We think it can be cool to bring in comments and social media from around the web.  That’s why we offer FriendFeed integration (where comments made in FriendFeed are pulled back to your blog), and trackback / pingback support with our WordPress Plugin.   Aggregating constructive and relevant content benefits your comment section (which is why we are checking out aggregation services like BackType and uberVU).

But there can be too much of a good thing — you wouldn’t want a cake that was all icing. Check out Matt Mullenweg’s recent post “6 Steps to Kill Your Community” (especially step 5).   Too many external scraps of “conversation” flood comment sections with retweets, and even tweets about comments on that post.  Adding in every single mention buries your comments and destroys the debate.

A real-time “conversation” aggregation system also introduces a whole new beast to deal with. Pulling in bits of “conversation” in real-time with no moderation would allow belligerent people to dominate a comment section simply by tweeting out curse words (or worse) over and over embarrassing your readers, and drowning out meaningful discussion.

Nicolas Holzapfel wrote an interesting TechCrunch post recently.  He touches on something that we’ve been fixated on for a while: there’s a limit to the number of comments that you’ll read on a post before you move on.  Let’s face it, few of us have time to read through hundreds of comments let alone Tweets, and comments from FriendFeed and Digg.

How can we make it easier to navigate through all of the comments so that you can find what you’re interested in?  We think IntenseDebate strikes the right balance: our user reputation scores, comment voting, comment sorting (by ranking), and comment/user following, are some of the ways we help bring good comments to the forefront.  We also auto-collapse comment threads (once there are 25 threads on a single post), to help navigate. There are a number of great ideas in the comment section of Nicolas’ post:

• Add headers and topics
• Show comments made by people within your social network (ID users)
• Filter comments by keyword
• Tag clouds

We keep an eye on everything and good ideas can come from anywhere. If you see something killer that we should do, let us know and if there’s enough demand or just if it’s super-cool we’ll get it on the roadmap.

What do you think?

Posted by Michael Koenig in feedback