We’re stoked to announce that our WordPress.com user account auto-login feature is back up and running.  We had disabled it briefly while we made some backend changes to the way this feature works, and it’s more solid than ever. This means that if you’re a WordPress.com user and you’re logged into your account, you’ll automatically be logged into IntenseDebate as well.  All you have to do is type your comment and hit submit.

Thanks for your patience!

Posted by Michael Koenig in features,News

We’ve been hard at work on some very cool projects, and I thought I’d share some details of one of the things I’ve been working on.  Our FAQ has become pretty dated – we’ve made loads of changes to IntenseDebate since we first put that together – and one of my projects has been to beef-up our support documentation to help you get answers to your questions easily.  We’ll be launching our shiny new FAQ soon.

While our goal is to make IntenseDebate as intuitive as possible, we realize that offering robust support documentation is key to helping you get up and running with your new comment system and commenter profile as quickly as possible.  I’ve answered thousands of support emails which have helped us identify ways to improve IntenseDebate (nearly all of our user-interface updates and new features are based on your feedback), and that’s also helped craft our new FAQ entries.

IntenseDebate is nothing without our community, so there’s no question that you all are the most important part of our team.  With that in mind, I’d love your feedback on your experience with IntenseDebate:

How was your initial experience with IntenseDebate?
Were there certain parts that you were confused about?
What helped you get familiar with it?
What would have improved your experience?
What can we add to our FAQ to help?

Whether you’ve installed IntenseDebate on your blog or you use your user account to comment on your favorite sites, your feedback is extremely important to us and we’d love to hear more.  Please leave us a comment below and help us improve our FAQ for future IntenseDebate users.

Thanks in advance!

Posted by Michael Koenig in community,feedback

It’s that time again folks: time for another release of our WordPress plugin!

Version 2.7 is available right now in the WordPress Plugin Directory, and you’ll be prompted to upgrade within your WordPress admin panel in the next few hours if you’re already running it. This version brings the following changes:

• Better loading of JSON libraries: We’ve revised the way that we load JSON (some of the core backend code used in syncing your comments!) so data sync should be much more reliable across more server configurations. Everyone should definitely upgrade for this one!
• Basic diagnostics to help people when they’re getting started: Running IntenseDebate on your own WordPress server requires a connection between our servers and your own. This handy little feature will help you detect if there are problems with that connection.
• Ability to configure the plugin using a WordPress.com account: We had some clashes between usernames of IntenseDebate users and WordPress.com users, so now you can specify which type of account you’re using to log in.

If you’ve had any trouble with a previous version, or were thinking about giving IntenseDebate a try, now’s a perfect time! Install directly through your WordPress admin panel: select Plugins > Add New menu option, or sign up now and follow the prompts.

Posted by Beau Lebens in WordPress Plugin

At long last the wait for Right-To-Left text in IntenseDebate is over!  We’re also stoked to introduce 9 new translations for your comment section. Without further ado, here are our new languages and the awesome folks who translated them:

• Dutch – Mark Kater
• Finnish – Juhani Heiskanen
• Hebrew – Matthew Ellis, Yoav Farhi
• Indonesian -Teguh
• Japanese – Atsushi Matsuura, Naoko McCracken
• Norwegian Bokmål – Stig Morten Myre
• Portuguese (PT) – Zé Fontainhas
• Romanian – Bogdan Andronic
• Vietnamese – Huân H

Hats off to all of our volunteers for their hard work, and many thanks to Yoav and Beau for their work on RTL – it was a major undertaking and we couldn’t have done it without them.

IntenseDebate is now available in 33 languages that are available in your account at http://intensedebate.com/edit-site-account:

Arabic	Dutch	German	Malay	Russian	Turkish
Bulgarian	English	Hebrew	Norwegian Bokmål	Slovak	Ukrainian
Catalan	Estonian	Indonesian	Polish	Slovene	Vietnamese
Croatian	Filipino	Italian	Portuguese (BR)	Spanish (LA)
Czech	Finnish	Japanese	Portuguese (PT)	Spanish (ES)
Danish	French	Lithuanian	Romanian	Swedish

We also have 18 other translations that are nearly ready for prime-time, but we need your help with reviewing them. If you’re interested please send me a note at labs@intensedebate.com.

Afrikaans	Chinese	Hindi	Korean	Maltese	Swahili
Albanian	Galician	Hungarian	Latvian	Persian (Farsi)	Tagalog
Belarusian	Greek	Icelandic	Macedonian	Serbian	Thai

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’re also going to be updating all of our translations in the near future to keep them up to date with the full set of strings in use on IntenseDebate, so if you helped out previously, keep an eye out for an email soon!

Posted by Michael Koenig in community,features

UPDATE: WordPress.com Auto-Login is back up and running! Please see http://wp.me/plsX6-IO for details. Thanks for your patience.

We’re making a few changes to how our WordPress.com automatic login feature works on the backend and we have temporarily disabled it.  Users are still able to log in to IntenseDebate manually using their WordPress.com account both at IntenseDebate.com and in the comment sections on your site.  Auto-login will be returning very soon and will work the same as it did before once it’s back.  We apologize for the inconvenience.

Posted by Jon Fox in News