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

Nothing ruins a vibrant comment thread faster than a link to buy cheap Xanax and play online poker at a porn site. Even worse is the friendly spam that can sometimes slip through – you know, it says “great site, I’ll be subscribing to your blog” but it’s really a link to a spammy website.  With that in mind, we’re doing some major work on our backend to improve the IntenseDebate spam filters and Akismet integration.

While there’s still work to be done, the good news is that we’re making excellent progress to improve the effectiveness of our filters. The not-so-good news is that our filters are sometimes too strict, and legitimate commenters are flagged as spam. This is happening because either the user’s past comments have been marked as spam, or their comments are confused as friendly spam. While we’re working to correct this issue, we’ve added a User Whitelist to serve as an immediate fix.  Adding a user to your whitelist will automatically approve all of their comments.

Your User Whitelist is located in your Moderation Settings Page at http://intensedebate.com/edit-site-moderation. To add a user to the whitelist, just type in their username and select the “Whitelist” button. Then make sure to click the save button at the bottom of the page.

User Profile Update
We’ve also made a minor change to the display name links in the comment section.  If you have added a blog or website to your IntenseDebate profile, your display name will now link to that instead of to your IntenseDebate profile page. If you haven’t added your blog or website to your profile, you can add it at http://intensedebate.com/editprofile.

Don’t have a blog or website? Don’t worry! Your display name will link to your IntenseDebate profile. You can still access IntenseDebate profiles by selecting “View IntenseDebate Profile” when you hover over an avatar. This was a popular request so we’re happy to provide this update!

Posted by Michael Koenig in features

Bonjour!  We spent last week in Quebec with our fellow Automattic colleagues for our annual company meetup, and we had an amazing time.  This was the first time Jon, Isaac, Beau, and I have been in the same room, so it was a pleasure to work side-by-side and kick around some ideas together.

We also got the chance to collaborate with the rest of the Automattic crew to look at how IntenseDebate can integrate with other Automattic projects, and learn how to apply their scaling knowledge to our systems.

While some of the projects aren’t ready to be disclosed yet, here are some general details about what we’re working on (please note that these include long-term projects):

• Backend Loading Optimization: We’re really excited about this project.  We are currently working on a new method for optimizing how we load comments and trackbacks.  This will improve load times even as the volume of comments on your blog continues to increase, as well as correct a couple of bugs.  Loading IntenseDebate will be even more seamless!
• More Sync Improvements: We had the opportunity to pick the brains of our brilliant WordPress system engineers about the inner-workings of WordPress. We will be adapting some of the code and principles they use to improve the quality of our syncing engine.  This is going to be huge for our plugin and will correct those pesky sync discrepancies that have been floating around affecting comment counts and backups.
• WordPress Plugin Overhaul: The core of our WordPress plugin was written prior to joining Automattic.  Since then our understanding of the WordPress codebase has drastically improved.  We have now identified significant portions of the plugin code that can be simplified or optimized making it much more lightweight and perform better.  The principles that we are applying in this overhaul will eventually be applied to our integrations with other platforms across the board.
• Moderation, Moderation, Moderation! Bug fixes aside, optimizing moderation is high priority.  The main moderation project that we’re currently working on is reworking your moderation page.  We will be minimizing the time you spend moderating comments and filtering spam, and simplifying your user experience.
• Support Documentation and Forums: We’re beefing-up our FAQ and support resources for end users, publishers and developers. This will help  everyone to find the answers they’re looking for.  More info to come on this one soon.

It’s an exciting time here at IntenseDebate!  We’re looking forward to pushing out loads of new code, and we will be depending on you for your feedback.  Keep an eye right here on our blog for the latest news.

Posted by Michael Koenig in News,WordPress Plugin

Brilliant comments have been submitted across IntenseDebate.  But once in a blue moon someone submits a great comment that’s perfect except there’s a typo or a curse word containing non-alphabetic ch@racter$ that slipped through your profanity filter!  Unfortunately when this happened the only available options were to leave the comment up or delete it.  Until now…

We’re extremely excited to introduce the latest enhancement to your IntenseDebate comments, Admin Comment Editing.

Now you can edit the details of all comments on all posts on your site (if you’re a site admin of course).  No more letting your users run wild, unless you’re into that sort of thing. 😉

Comment Edit links are located in two different places in your account at IntenseDebate.com: your Moderation page, and your Comment History page (for editing comments that have already been posted).  If you are using our WordPress Plugin, you will find a link to edit comments in your WordPress admin panel.

Please note: you will not be able to edit user info for authenticated comments (like those posted using an IntenseDebate, Twitter, or Facebook account).

We built this feature based on your feedback, so keep it coming.  We’ve always got an eye out for cool ideas and we’re always listening, so please feel free to share your thoughts with us.  If you haven’t given IntenseDebate a try yet, there’s no better time than now.  Get started!

Posted by Michael Koenig in features

When you’re on a roll, you’re on a roll!  We’ve got two new admin features to introduce today: Ban Users & View Deleted Comments.

Banning Users
This just got a whole lot easier. If you recall, before you could only ban users from the moderation page when their comments were flagged. Take a look at your blog Settings page in your IntenseDebate profile. At the bottom right there’s a brand new section where you can input a username to ban that user from commenting. We think you’ll agree: this is a big improvement from having to either ban the user by email, IP, or add their username as a keyword.

View Deleted Comments
Until now deleted comments were gone forever! Now you can view all comments that have been deleted from your blog. This will come in handy if you’ve got an itchy trigger finger and tend to delete comments by accident. Now you can undelete them! Check out your Moderation page and you’ll see a shiny new Deleted Comments tab. This tab includes all comments that hit your blacklists in addition to comments that you deleted.

We’ve got some more cool projects in the works, so 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