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 time for American Thanksgiving! We will be closing IntenseDebate email support on Thursday, November 26 so we can celebrate the holiday with our families. We’ll be back bright and early on Friday morning to answer your questions while we eat our Thanksgiving leftovers though.

Happy Thanksgiving,
The fellas at IntenseDebate

Posted by Michael Koenig in News

As Matt mentioned in the September Wrap-Up, we are heading to Québec City with the rest of the Automattic crew for our biannual meetup to work on some top-secret projects.

Here at Automattic we are spread across the world, and are in a sense a distributed company.  For instance, Beau is located in San Fransisco, CA; Jon is in Boulder, CO; I’m in Chicago, IL; and Isaac is in Veddige, Sweden.  So we relish the opportunity to get together to kick-it, toss around some ideas, and collaborate with the rest of the Automattic team.

Past meetups have yielded some super-cool features and enhancements for IntenseDebate like our PollDaddy Polls plugin, Gravatar integration, localization, backend integration, and some top-secret projects that are still underway.  We’ve also contributed to WordPress.com features like Reply-By-Email which was a product of our time with the Automattic crew last October in Breckenridge, Colorado (picture below).

The Automattic family has grown since our last meetup so we’re excited to have the opportunity to meet and trade ideas with our newest colleagues. With that in mind, while support will still be readily available and answered daily, please allow for some extra-time in the upcoming week as we might take slightly longer to respond. We greatly appreciate your patience.

You can expect great things to come!

Posted by Michael Koenig in News