Andy Bailey, the code ninja behind CommentLuv, has been working to get CommentLuv integrated with IntenseDebate, and we’re pumped to let you know that the shiny new ID CommentLuv plugin is ready for primetime! CommentLuv has been always been a widely requested feature, and with good reason – it’s the perfect fit for IntenseDebate, and will go a long way in helping strengthen your community. You can check out Andy’s post here.

So what’s CommentLuv?

CommentLuv rewards your readers and helps you discover new and interesting posts by automatically adding a titled link to the comment authors last blog post when they comment.

Just like all of our plugins, activating is one simple click of the mouse and you’re done. When you’re logged in, go to http://intensedebate.com/plugins, find the CommentLuv plugin, and hit “Activate”. That’s it! Make sure you check out our other plugins like PollDaddy Polls, After the Deadline spelling and grammar checker, and loads more.

Using the CommentLuv plugin is a piece of cake. Just select the CommentLuv checkbox, enter your site URL, and select the post that you’d like to link to. Type your comment, hit submit, and voilà – you’re done! We’ve activated the plugin on our blog, so give a try below.

Interested in flexing your own coding muscles and developing a super-slick plugin? Check out our Plugin Resources and documentation. You can also check out our Plugins blog post for more information.

Hats off to Andy for his work to bring CommentLuv to IntenseDebate!

Posted by Michael Koenig in features

A little while back we opened up IntenseDebate for localization, and we received over 100 volunteers to help translate IntenseDebate to 43 languages.  Within a couple of weeks we were able to launch translations for 11 languages: Arabic, Croatian, Filipino, French, German, Malay, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Latin American Spanish, European Spanish, and Ukrainian. This week we’re excited to release 6 additional translations.

Here are the new languages that we’re releasing, along with the awesome folks who contributed to each translation:

• Bulgarian – Rado Stoyanov and his team
• Catalan – afontcu
• Estonian – Helari Hellenurm
• Italian – Tiziano Fogliata, Andrea Torre, Aldo Latino
• Lithuanian – Darius, Gintausas Kaveckas
• Slovak – terchulak

These translations are available in your Blog Settings page at IntenseDebate.com.

We’re looking forward to making more translations available for use as they continue to get completed.  So far we’ve received volunteers to help translate these additional languages:

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. Ideally we’d like to have at least two Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiønër’s working together for each translation. Thanks!

Posted by Michael Koenig in community,features

By now you’re all aware that we’ve been working on allowing you to display your comment section in different languages, and today we’d like to make that available to everyone! Thanks to a fantastic effort from 24 volunteers collaborating across 5 continents, we’re able to offer 12 new languages to you right off the bat, with more languages hopefully coming soon. Here are the new languages that we’re releasing, along with the awesome folks who contributed to each translation:

• Arabic (Egypt)
  • Hisham Sadek – blog
• Croatian
  • “Andrija Papec – blog
• Filipino
  • Kevin Paquet – blog
• French
  • Alexandre Vallières-Lagacé – blog
  • Brice Gouban – blog
  • Jeremy Selier – blog
• German
  • Thomas Kalka – blog
  • Thomas Knapp – blog
• Malay
  • JL – blog
• Portuguese (Brazil)
  • Rafael Fischmann from MacMagazine
  • Vinicius – blog
  • Bernardo Pina – blog
  • David Soares – blog
  • Bruno Alves – blog
  • Beto Cadilhe – blog
  • João Pedro Cunha – blog
• Russian
  • Sergey Soloviov – blog
  • Maxim Yanovsky (Максим Яновский) – blog
  • hell0men – blog
• Spanish (Mexico)
  • Jorge Martinez – blog
  • Oscar Cubillos Herrera – blog
• Spanish (Spain)
  • Peter Olle – blog
• Ukranian
  • Vladimir Medushivsky (ДЭВИД®) – twitter

To change the language used in the comments area on your site, just go into the fancy new Settings & Layout section of intensedebate.com and the pick the Layout option on the left. At the bottom of that page you can pick from the list of supported languages.

These are first runs of the translations, so please take a look and see what you think. If there are any words you think might make more sense as something different, then please drop us a line at labs@intensedebate.com, letting us know what language you’re looking at and where the text you’re talking about appears. It might be easiest if you send us a screenshot showing exactly which bit of text you’re talking about.

Thanks for all of your patience, and another huge thank you to the wonderful volunteers who have made this possible.

If you don’t see your language and you’re interested in translating, please email us at the address above. We would love your help!

Posted by Beau Lebens in features

We’re excited to introduce a new enhancement for our Facebook Connect implementation: share comments back to Facebook.  We recently rolled this out, so if you use Facebook Connect to post comments in IntenseDebate then you might have noticed this.

Our Facebook Connect integration is a cool way to let your readers post comments using their Facebook profiles. With our latest enhancement they can now opt to share their comments with their Facebook friends when they post using Facebook Connect. Just like our “tweet this” Twitter integration, this is a great way to get your friends in the debate and drive new traffic to your blog and comments.

When you’re logged into Facebook Connect you’ll notice a new “Share on Facebook” checkbox just below the comment textbox on the right. Select that when you post using your Facebook Connect account and you’ll have the option to customize the text that you post back to Facebook.

If you haven’t given IntenseDebate a try yet, now is the perfect time! Get started with IntenseDebate.

Posted by Michael Koenig in features

We’re excited to introduce two new IntenseDebate Plugins: AddThis and Facebook Share buttons for your posts!

Facebook Share Button
The Facebook Share button provides your readers with an easy way to share your blog post with all of their Facebook friends. Now you can install the Facebook Share Button with one click through your IntenseDebate Plugins page. Hats off to Dog Lover for developing this plugin! Make sure you check out Dog Lover’s other plugin, TweetMeme Retweet Button.

AddThis Share Button
AddThis is a bookmarking and sharing service. Enabling the AddThis button gives your readers the ability to share your blog post with their friends through a variety of online services (in addition to Facebook). Many thanks to tylerabell for his contribution!

We love offering new ways to enrich your blog and comment section with additional third party services with just a simple mouse click. Just like our other IntenseDebate Plugins, like PollDaddy Polls, Seesmic Video comments, Smiley, and YouTube (among others), there’s no need to mess around with any code in your template. We do it for you. All you have to do is activate it!

Learn more about our Plugins and Plugins API.

Posted by Michael Koenig in features