IntenseDebate – Enhanced Commenting System for Blogs

In my desire to better implement a new commenting system, I have chosen an excellent free tool, Intense Debate, which enhances & encourages user feedback and commenting. With this new commenting system, I’ll be able to implement better widgets such as Top Commenter, Most Popular Posts, etc. It also enables you to promote your blog when leaving comments & further engage with other commenters.

The one downside is that all previous comments no longer display, but I will still have access to those comments, they just won’t be displayed. Below is a summary of the added functionality.

Blog Owner Benefits

• Reply By Email
• Users Reputations
• RSS Feeds
• Widgets (Top Commenter, Recent Comments, Most Popular Post, etc)
• Threaded Comments
• Tracking and Notifications
• Profiles
• Comment Voting
• Social Traffic Drive

Readers Benefits

• Promote your Blog when leaving comments
• Follow conversations within comments better with comment threading. Comment threading makes reading comments manageable
• More fun to engage in debates
• Comment notification emails an alert to you when someone has responded to your comment & makes it easy to respond via “Reply By E-mail”
• Vote on other comments & gain reputation points which give your comments more authority
• Subscribe to comments via RSS
• Follow your friends as they comment

As you can see above, the new commenting system has a rating system on the right (thumb up or down) & if you move your cursor on the individual who commented, you’ll be able to see their blogs as well as profiles in Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Digg, Delicious & a few others that I didn’t have an account with. Of course, this would require that you create your profile, but it’s quick & easy to do.

I hope you enjoy the new commenting system as much as I am. In creating my profile, I was able to add my Twitter profile, both blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, Digg & other social networking profile links. I suggest you check out the system & take advantage of the benefits.