We’ve received a lot of requests recently to move the comment form to the top of the comment section rather than having it at the bottom. We prefer having the comment form at the bottom so your visitors have a chance to catch-up on the debate before posting their comment – that helps cut down on duplicate comments and encourages interaction. But it’s your site and we’re all about customization!

To make it happen, you need to add the following CSS to your Custom CSS page in your IntenseDebate account:

#idc-container-parent #idc-container {
position: relative;
padding-top: 320px;
}

#idc-container-parent #idc-container #IDCommentsNewThreadCover {
position: absolute;
top: 0;
left: 0;
width: 100%;
}

For more CSS help, check out our CSS Documentation and feel free to give us a shout at support@intensedebate.com with any questions. Oh, and don’t forget to check out our other styling tips to simplify your comment section design!

Posted by Michael Koenig in features

We’re stoked to introduce our new Moderator Role for your blog account.  One of the standard features of IntenseDebate is the option to assign multiple admins to help manage your blog account.  Assigning additional admins would give them full permissions to change your blog account settings and moderate comments.  But we’ve found that sometimes that’s a little too much power to dish out (you know… “with great power comes great responsibility”).

As of today you can keep them all in check.  Now you can promote any IntenseDebate or WordPress.com user to help moderate comments without having to give them full access to your account settings.  You can add additional Moderators and Admins to manage your account in your Moderation Settings page.

Promoting a user as a Moderator will give them access to your Moderation and Comment History pages.  They’ll also be able to remove comments that are out-of-line directly from the comment section. We’ve got some development plans in action to further expand your arsenal of admin features.

Voting
We’ve added a new option for you to disable thumbs-down voting if you want to keep things a little more positive in your comment section. This option is available in your Comment Settings page.

Our goal with this option is to minimize voting bias and the mob mentality that can kick-in when you see a comment in the red. Votes are one of the main factors for user reputation scores, and negative votes can have a major impact on a commenter’s score, especially if they’re brand new to IntenseDebate.

Commenters might also be more likely to give the thumbs-down to users with negative rep scores, so it’s even more difficult for them to climb out. We don’t want them to feel defeated and stop commenting, especially if their crime is that they voiced an unpopular opinion on a political blog or news site (which is quite common). We wanted to give admins the option to avoid this.

On the other hand, there are some malicious comments (and commenters) that deserve the negative ratings, so we wanted to still give admins the option to offer the thumbs-down. We hope that you’ll find this helpful in further encouraging conversations.

More updates and additions to come! 🙂

Posted by Michael Koenig in features