We’re really excited about our latest beta release that we rolled out last night. The main attraction is Reply By Email – blog owners can now reply to comments made on their blogs, approve or deny friendship requests, and moderate comments all via email. If you’re interested in getting in on this beta, please drop me a line at support@intensedebate.com.

In addition, email and IP addresses will now be included in your new comment posting email notifications for our beta testers. We’ve had numerous requests from our users to be able to privately chat with each other. This is the first step! This new functionality is just a stepping stone of some awesome features to come, so stay tuned and get in on this beta!

Kudos to Jon and Isaac on a job well done!

Posted by Michael Koenig in features

We’re making great strides here at Intense Debate in indexing comments! We’ve teamed up with Lijit to help bring light to what we call “the Dark Matter of the Blogosphere,” by which we mean most blog comments, which are usually not indexed by big search engines. For the first time blog readers and commenters have the ability to search through the vast number of comments made on blogs with Intense Debate.

What does this mean exactly? Glad you asked! In the past, comments have been unsearchable. You’ve invested your time and written informative essays in response to blog posts only to have them lost into the comment abyss. Finding comments was like searching for buried treasure – unless you had some sort of map where X marks the spot you couldn’t find them. Even if you had a map there was no guarantee. Well now with the first phase of our Lijit integration you can search for comments a bit easier. Consider it a far more reliable treasure map, or an awesome metal detector.

Lijit provides bloggers with an enhanced ability to let their readers search for and discover content on the Internet. If you haven’t given Lijit a try you’re missing out. Now, Intense Debate and Lijit have teamed up to put the wisdom of your comments on the map.

Stay tuned for further innovations…

Posted by Michael Koenig in features

In the interest of full-disclosure with the Intense Debate community, I’d like acknowledge that there have been a couple of bugs in the system. Rest assured, we’ve pushed fixes for the major ones and will have fixes for any lingering ones shortly. We appreciate your patience as we take care of these. We request that you please hold-off on submitting reports for the next few hours as we continue to knock-off the lingering bugs. However, if you are still experiencing any issues at the end of the day, please submit your reports to support@intensedebate.com. Please make your reports as detailed as possible and include any screenshots you have. This will expedite the troubleshooting process.

Thanks for your patience. Intense Debate will be good as new. I’ll keep you updated as we continue to kick some bug ass.

Posted by Michael Koenig in News

You may have already noticed, but just in case I thought I’d point it out. Last weekend we gave our servers a massive upgrade allowing us to continue to handle the enormous growth Intense Debate has been experiencing. This overhaul has made Intense Debate faster than ever! So if you notice that extra little step in your stride, feather in your hat or what have you, it’s probably because of our new servers!

In addition we’ve also added new editing power to Intense Debate comments. This has been one of the most requested features and we’re pretty excited to deliver it. If your fingers slip or you have a change of heart, there’s no need to fret, you can edit your comments right there immediately!

Posted by Michael Koenig in features

This has been one of the most frequently requested features, and for good reason. Now you have the option to delete comments that you’ve made on other blogs. So if you find a typo or have a change of heart, don’t worry about it – nothing is written in stone!

There’s good news for blog owners too. You no longer have to go to your account at IntenseDebate.com in order to delete comments made on your blog. You can now delete comments directly from your blog!

Here’s how you do it: To delete a comment made on a blog, click the “Delete” button found in the lower right corner of the comment box. That’s all there is to it!

Posted by Michael Koenig in features