Today we’re happy to announce another release, although this one probably won’t be as noticeable as some in the past.  Last night we released a completely rewritten loading system for our comments.  We’ve also completely redone our caching procedures, upgraded our infrastructure, and even optimized our server configurations a bit.  So what does all this mean?  Well, it’s all geared toward making the comments load faster than ever before.  You should start seeing noticeable improvements in our comment system’s load time.

Also, something that is a little more obvious is the addition of the sorting options to the comment system.  You can now sort by date (like a more traditional comment system would), comment rating (what it’s always done up till now), and most recent activity, which orders them by putting the most recent comments at the top, making it easier than ever to keep track of how the conversation is progressing and organize the comments how you want them.

We’ve got a lot of changes in progress right now and lots of exciting things happening in the next few weeks…we’ll let you know as it unfolds.

Posted by Jon Fox in features

Today we are announcing that Josh is leaving Intense Debate for personal reasons.  We all feel this is what’s best for both Intense Debate and Josh. We certainly wish him well in his future pursuits.

Losing a team member in a small startup like ours is obviously never easy, but we remain committed to providing the best tool for online conversation to all of our users.

We’ve got some really exciting stuff in the pipeline, so keep checking back for the latest news.

Posted by Jon Fox in News

We’ve got several new things we’ve rolled out today.  Probably the first thing you’ll notice is this blog’s redesign.  This new look matches the rest of our site better and puts a new shine on this blog.

Another recent update is to the forums.  We’ve done several changes to help speed up the load time as well as offer new options for sorting to make it easier to find what you’re looking for.  You can expect to see these sorting options rolled out to blogs shortly.

And finally, a few things you may or may not notice are several bug fixes that have been released.  The issues with comments that couldn’t be found to be deleted as well as some issues with multiple posts should be resolved among others.

As always, feel free to give us your feedback in the forums or by email (contactus@intensedebate.com).

Posted by Jon Fox in News

There’s been a lot of stuff going on around here recently. We wanted to make a couple quick announcements to keep you informed.

The most noticeable is the new front page. We continue to strive to make it simpler and easier for our new users to give Intense Debate a try. We now offer a single line of javascript, available right from the front page, that allows anyone to drop Intense Debate Comments into any blog or website. This gives a quick, easy way to test drive Intense Debate for yourself.

Another thing to note is the announcement of our new product team. We’ve been hearing your feedback and we really took it to heart. We compiled a list of bloggers to give us direct feedback on new designs, features, and ideas. Please check out the product team page to see the full list. A big thanks goes to all of our product team for their help and commitment to making Intense Debate better. We’ll take all the help we can get in making Intense Debate the best commenting solution available!

And lastly, something you might or might not have directly noticed is that we’re in midst of many changes to help improve the performance of our product. We’ve already made several updates, and there are several more on the way, all geared toward making a faster, more efficient product for our users.

As always, feel free to give us feedback and help shape the product. You can contact us by posting in our forums or emailing us directly at contactus@intensedebate.com. We’ve got several exciting things in the queue, so be sure to check back frequently.

Posted by Jon Fox in News

From time to time we will refer to the fun things happening around the Intense Debate network. After navigating around some of the sites using the Intense Debate comment system, I realized a lot is going on.

Dumb Little Man is a great blog and has been on a roll this week with a few articles making it to the frontpage of Digg. I asked Jay how he does it, but he won’t reveal his secret. My guess is that great content plays a role.

One of our newest ID’ers is called Drinks Are On Me. If you are interested in food and drink, I recommend it! After reading a few articles I felt incredibly hungry.

Brad Feld is blogging about email and who is talking about it. The follow up post should be very interesting.

Political Grind expanded their network. Congrats to the guys there. They were one of our early adopters and have seen a 110% increase in their comments since installing ID. We definitely don’t take full credit as the people behind PG produce great content.

Micah Baldwin shared an excellent personal story of success and failure over at Learn To Duck. If you are part of a startup or thinking about starting up a company you should definitely read this.

Fraser from Adaptive Blue put up a great post on his personal blog, Disruptive Thoughts, about his trip to the Boulder/Denver area. His conclusion: it is a great place for a tech startup. I couldn’t agree more.

There are many great things people are talking about around our network and they are using the Intense Debate comment system to continue the conversation. If something remarkable is happening at your blog, email me (josh at intensedebate dot com) and we might feature you in a future edition.

Posted by Isaac Keyet in News