You guys have helped IntenseDebate grow a huge amount over the past few months. Overall this is great! We love helping people take the conversation on their blog / website to the next level, and of course once you get IntenseDebate going you know you grow even faster.  It has put quite a strain on our systems though.  I’m sure you’re all aware of our outages over the last few weeks.

We’ve been working non-stop to address these issues. Our highest priority is improving the performance and long term scalability of IntenseDebate for you.

Now we could leave it at that, be completely opaque about what changes we’re doing and just hope that you’ll trust that we’re working hard on the problem, but you all deserve more and need to trust that our service can perform for you.  So here’s a behind-the-scenes peek for those of you interested in how we’re tackling this problem.

The first major change we’ve been working on is sharding some of our larger and most frequently used tables into a more efficient and scalable database schema.  For those of you not familiar with sharding it means storing all your data in several smaller tables instead of one large monolithic table.  This allows us to get your data much more quickly and makes for a much more horizontally scalable system. (We can continue to add more tables to keep them small as our total data storage increases.)  This is complete for our most heavily used data, comments, and will continue where appropriate.

The second change is creating more summary tables to simplify the retrieval of common data.  Even after sharding some of the data is still too slow to compute on-the-fly.  Summary tables cache frequently used computations which will allow us to get this information almost instantly.

Last, but not least, we’re optimizing our logging and background processing.  We do quite a bit of logging to ensure things are running  smoothly and to help debug quickly when things don’t.  In particular the syncing process to and from WordPress blogs has a lot of activity we store for troubleshooting.  We’ve done some work to make this logging faster and less system heavy, as well as some fine tuning of what and when we log in order to help ensure that these troubleshooting tools don’t have a negative impact on the performance of the core service.

I want to reiterate we’re acutely aware of performance over the last few weeks and there is no excuse for poor service or performance.  We’ve fixed the most pressing issues, but we’re taking a number of proactive steps to ensure that we can maintain the level of service that you deserve from us.  Thank you all for your patience and understanding.

Posted by Jon Fox in News

We’ve rolled out some cool changes to your User Menu!  Ever notice that when you hover your mouse cursor over a user’s profile picture, their User Menu drops down displaying links to their profile, blogs, and more?  Well the User Menus just got a whole lot more useful!

Not only do they look super-sweet, they also present higher quality info right up front, while minimizing the footprint.  Now you can quickly learn about your fellow commenters.  We’ve got some more changes to the comment section coming soon.

So what’s new in the User Menu?

• Profile Picture now blows-up so you can get a good look at it.
• Reputation Score is included.
• User Description & Latest Tweet are both there so you don’t have to choose one or the other.
• Slick New Look

So now when you hover her avatar you’ll get a better look at miss Swann and learn more about her all at the same time!  Not too shabby!

If you haven’t given IntenseDebate a try yet, there’s no better time than now!  Get started with IntenseDebate.

Posted by Michael Koenig in features

Hi everyone, my name is Beau and I’ve been working with the guys here at IntenseDebate to improve their WordPress plugin and its syncing functionality. I’ve been using the WP plugin myself since last year (check out my public IntenseDebate profile!) so it’s been really great to be able to work with the team here and help improve a service that I’m personally a big fan of. WordPress has become a major part of my personal and professional life, so I’m happy that the integration between IntenseDebate and WordPress is constantly improving.

We’ve been hard at work updating the IntenseDebate service and finding out what folks like you would like to see from us. One of the biggest requests we’ve had for the WordPress Plugin is to sync moderation settings between your WordPress blog and IntenseDebate. Well, ask and ye shall receive!

Syncing Discussion/Moderation Settings
The biggest new feature in this version is that all relevant discussion/moderation settings (words/email addresses/IPs that cause a comment to go to moderation or be blacklisted, email notification options etc) will now be synced between your WordPress blog and your IntenseDebate control panel. This means that you can use either of them to make changes, and they will automatically update each other.

In addition to that, we’ve done a lot of code cleanup and some other backend tweaks to make things run more smoothly. We’ve also improved the integration with your WordPress Admin Panel for comment moderation. That panel should load faster now as well thanks to some optimizations we’ve implemented. Did you ever notice that if you saved your WordPress profile information, you’d have to log back into IntenseDebate again? Not anymore, that one got fixed as well.

Install/Upgrade
If you’re installing the plugin for the first time, it will ask you if you’d like to merge your moderation settings with IntenseDebate, right after you log into your account:

We recommend that you leave that box checked, which will add our default spam-catching naughty-words to any that you might have set up in WordPress already. Once you have the new plugin installed, things should automatically start syncing between the two systems whenever you make a change to your moderation settings.

If you already have a previous version of the IntenseDebate plugin installed, you should see an upgrade reminder appear in your Admin Panel soon. If not (or if you prefer to do these things manually), you can download the plugin from the WordPress Plugin Directory now.

Once you’re finished upgrading you’ll need to trigger a sync to make sure things get started properly. Log into IntenseDebate and go to the “Settings” page for your blog. Add a single space character to the “Moderate posts containing the following words” box and hit “Save settings”. Your IntenseDebate settings will now be synced over to WordPress and things will stay in sync from now on.

Thinking about giving IntenseDebate a try? There’s no better time than the now! Get started with IntenseDebate!

UPDATE

We have identified and fixed an issue with the importer.  Please update your plugin to version 2.1.1.   You should have an upgrade message in your WP plugins panel. If you don’t please download the plugin here.

Posted by Beau Lebens in WordPress Plugin

That’s right, Facebook Connect is here!

We’ve begun a limited roll-out of Facebook Connect.  Leave a comment if you’re interested in getting in on the early action, and we’ll email you with some instructions.  Don’t worry if you don’t hear from us immediately, we’ll get you in on the Facebook Connect goodness as soon as we can.

Facebook Connect will be available for everyone soon!

Thanks!

Update – Thursday, March 26

Thanks everyone for your interest in Facebook Connect.  We’re still rolling it out slowly.  If you haven’t heard from us yet please hang in there.  Thanks again for your patience and help!

Update – Tuesday, July 7

Facebook Connect is now live and available for everyone! Please check out this post for more information. Thanks!

Posted by Michael Koenig in features

We’re kicking off a new series of blog posts that will reveiw some of our features that you might not know about.  The first post in this series will review our moderation and blacklisting settings.  Our moderation page is going through a redesign right now, but this will get you off the ground and familiar with our current settings.

Moderation & Blacklisting Filters
IntenseDebate offers some truly hardcore moderation and blacklisting settings. Get the most out of our service and let us do the work of weeding out comments that are out-of-line with our automatic filters. You can automagically hold comments for your approval or have them deleted by:

• Keyword
• Number of links in the comment
• Email address of the commenter
• IP address

Enabling these settings is easy.  Just login to your account and select the “Settings” tab.  You’ll find several text boxes on the left side of the page where you can enter in all of the above info.  Make sure you separate your entries with spaces only!  You can access the IP addresses in your comment notification emails.

Comment Posting Settings
We offer some additional comment posting settings to help you weed out the rubbish.  With IntenseDebate you can require:

• All commenters to signup with IntenseDebate before posting*
• Commenters must have a previously approved comment*
• All comments are held for moderation before they are displayed*
• Or none of the above! (default setting)

*Disabled by default

Akismet Filtering
Don’t forget about our Akismet integration!  Your IntenseDebate account provides you with the option to run all comments through our cusotm Akismet integration.  You can enable Akismet filtering in your Settings panel.

Check out your Settings panel in your IntenseDebate account for more options!

Posted by Michael Koenig in features