Howdy folks!

Today we released version 2.6 of our WordPress plugin, which is available in the WordPress Plugin Directory, or via your WordPress dashboard.  It’s been a while since we released a new version of our WordPress plugin (over 2 months actually).  That’s because we’ve been pushing-out all the new features and code on our end, rather than making you update all the time – no one likes upgrade fatigue.

Version 2.6 has a few minor changes that are needed to make the IntenseDebate plugin fully compatible with certain combinations of WordPress 2.9 and PHP.

If you’re already using the plugin without any problems then it’s not critical that you update, but it’s always a good idea to stay up-to-date with the latest versions. If you had any problems getting the plugin working previously, now is a great time to give IntenseDebate another try.  Version 2.6 should be the perfect cure for your plugin fever.

Download the latest version now and give it a shot!

Posted by Beau Lebens in WordPress Plugin

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

We recently reached a major milestone for the IntenseDebate WordPress plugin: we’ve passed 100,000 downloads of our plugin through the WordPress repository!

Even cooler yet, that statistic does not include the total number of Blogger, Typepad, Movable Type, Tumblr, Joomla, Squarespace, iWeb, Ning, Omeka, Drupal, or Generic installs of IntenseDebate.

Thanks for your continued support and for helping us spread the word about IntenseDebate.  Here’s to the next 100,000!

Posted by Michael Koenig in News

Nothing ruins a vibrant comment thread faster than a link to buy cheap Xanax and play online poker at a porn site. Even worse is the friendly spam that can sometimes slip through – you know, it says “great site, I’ll be subscribing to your blog” but it’s really a link to a spammy website.  With that in mind, we’re doing some major work on our backend to improve the IntenseDebate spam filters and Akismet integration.

While there’s still work to be done, the good news is that we’re making excellent progress to improve the effectiveness of our filters. The not-so-good news is that our filters are sometimes too strict, and legitimate commenters are flagged as spam. This is happening because either the user’s past comments have been marked as spam, or their comments are confused as friendly spam. While we’re working to correct this issue, we’ve added a User Whitelist to serve as an immediate fix.  Adding a user to your whitelist will automatically approve all of their comments.

Your User Whitelist is located in your Moderation Settings Page at http://intensedebate.com/edit-site-moderation. To add a user to the whitelist, just type in their username and select the “Whitelist” button. Then make sure to click the save button at the bottom of the page.

User Profile Update
We’ve also made a minor change to the display name links in the comment section.  If you have added a blog or website to your IntenseDebate profile, your display name will now link to that instead of to your IntenseDebate profile page. If you haven’t added your blog or website to your profile, you can add it at http://intensedebate.com/editprofile.

Don’t have a blog or website? Don’t worry! Your display name will link to your IntenseDebate profile. You can still access IntenseDebate profiles by selecting “View IntenseDebate Profile” when you hover over an avatar. This was a popular request so we’re happy to provide this update!

Posted by Michael Koenig in features

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