Happy May 5th everyone. To celebrate we’ve released two updates: bit.ly URL’s for tweeted comments, and comment voting for everyone.

We used to use tinyurl.com for link shortening when you sent a simultaneous tweet when commenting. Now we’ve switched to bit.ly and you can track real-time click data for your tweets.

And in the spirit of freedom, we have enabled comment voting for everyone: IntenseDebate, WordPress.com, Facebook Connect, and Twitter Sign-in users, along with Guest commenters.

Both of these updates have been requested frequently so we’re happy to deliver. Enjoy! 🙂

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