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!
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!
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!
IntenseDebate is now available in 24 languages: Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, English, Estonian, Filipino, French, German, Italian, Lithuanian, Malay, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Slovene, Latin American Spanish, European Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Ukrainian. And there are more on the way!
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 will be closing support for two days this week in order to spend time with our families whilst trying not to overcook the turkey, coping with relatives, and staying sane (err… warm).
Support will be unavailable from 8pm EST on December 23rd to 8am EST on December 26th. Of course our systems include monitoring and our network/operations folks are always here, keeping an eye on the debate.
Last month Beau spoke at WordCamp NYC and he had the opportunity to demo IntenseDebate. Since we thought internet access might be a problem, Beau pre-recorded a screencast (using iShowU for Mac) running through all the features, then just talked over the top. The first video (below) is the pre-recorded screencast, and the second video provides audio and some shots of Beau speaking. Play them both at the same time and it’s like you’re actually there!
IntenseDebate - Official Blog 