We’re excited to welcome Scott Beale and the Laughing Squid blog to IntenseDebate. Scott installed our WordPress plugin over the weekend, and we’re excited to have him and his readers join our community.

In case you’re not familiar:

Laughing Squid is a resource for art, culture & technology and independent web hosting company. It is run by primary tentacle Scott Beale, who is also the publisher & editor of the blog and is joined by the occasional guest blogger.

Swing by and check out the latest and greatest over at Laughing Squid!

Posted by Michael Koenig in News

It’s time for American Thanksgiving! We will be closing IntenseDebate email support on Thursday, November 26 so we can celebrate the holiday with our families. We’ll be back bright and early on Friday morning to answer your questions while we eat our Thanksgiving leftovers though.

Happy Thanksgiving,
The fellas at IntenseDebate

Posted by Michael Koenig in News

Last week we announced the release of 6 new translations, and we’re pleased to release 2 more translations this week and dish out some much deserved credit to the awesome folks behind them:

• Polish – miguelm75
• Slovene – Marck Goran Lrencin, Aleš Gabrovec

IntenseDebate is now available in 20 languages: Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, English, Estonian, Filipino, French, German, Italian, Lithuanian, Malay, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Slovene, Latin American Spanish, European Spanish, and Ukrainian. And there are more on the way!

These translations are available in your Blog Settings page at IntenseDebate.com.

We’re looking forward to making more translations available for use as they continue to get completed. So far we’ve received volunteers to help translate these additional languages (let us know if you would like to help with any of these!):

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

Andy Bailey, the code ninja behind CommentLuv, has been working to get CommentLuv integrated with IntenseDebate, and we’re pumped to let you know that the shiny new ID CommentLuv plugin is ready for primetime! CommentLuv has been always been a widely requested feature, and with good reason – it’s the perfect fit for IntenseDebate, and will go a long way in helping strengthen your community. You can check out Andy’s post here.

So what’s CommentLuv?

CommentLuv rewards your readers and helps you discover new and interesting posts by automatically adding a titled link to the comment authors last blog post when they comment.

Just like all of our plugins, activating is one simple click of the mouse and you’re done. When you’re logged in, go to http://intensedebate.com/plugins, find the CommentLuv plugin, and hit “Activate”. That’s it! Make sure you check out our other plugins like PollDaddy Polls, After the Deadline spelling and grammar checker, and loads more.

Using the CommentLuv plugin is a piece of cake. Just select the CommentLuv checkbox, enter your site URL, and select the post that you’d like to link to. Type your comment, hit submit, and voilà – you’re done! We’ve activated the plugin on our blog, so give a try below.

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.

Hats off to Andy for his work to bring CommentLuv to IntenseDebate!

Posted by Michael Koenig in features

It’s been a while now (almost 3 months!) since the last update to our WordPress plugin, and a lot has been going on here at IntenseDebate HQ since then. We’ve been working on our end to improve how the plugin interacts with our servers, and now we’re ready to release a new version which updates how it operates as well. Here are some of the new and improved bits in this version:

• Added a bunch of new API functions to enable better remote queue management (for syncing): get comment counts, get approved comment counts, get a copy of your sync queue, manage individual operations, lock queue temporarily
• Improved handling of duplicate comments
• Improved syncing on comment statuses
• Fixed a bug with closing comments on a Post/Page
• Added partial support for the Trash feature coming in WordPress 2.9*
• Added functionality to allow us to re-import a single Post to help fix up any sync problems (more efficient than re-importing your entire site)
• Lots of small improvements and fixes to the way the sync queue operates to avoid overloading your site (and ours) and to increase the success of requests.

* We’re going to be releasing an update in the near future, once we sort out a few remaining issues with the Trash functionality. When you upgrade to WordPress 2.9 (once it’s released!) you’ll also want to upgrade to that new version.

This version of the plugin has gone through a load of testing on WordPress versions 2.5, right up to the current “trunk” and WordPressMU version 2.6 to the current release (2.8.5.2). We’d like to note that in the next versions, we’re going to drop support for versions of WordPress below 2.7, so if for some reason you’re running an old version of WordPress, we’d strongly recommend that you upgrade!

If you are already using IntenseDebate on your WordPress blog then you should see a plugin update notification in your admin dashboard soon. If you haven’t tried us out yet, then now is the perfect time, with our best plugin release to date! You can search for the plugin (“IntenseDebate Comments”) under Plugins > Add New, or download it directly from the WordPress Plugin Directory.

Posted by Beau Lebens in WordPress Plugin