Heading into the New Year we can’t help but look back on this past year. To say it’s been an exciting year for IntenseDebate is an understatement!

Our comment system has developed into a robust and sophisticated tool for building a community, increasing engagement, and giving sites a nice boost in page views. It couldn’t have happened without the non-stop effort of our team. Hats off to the entire team for the tremendous work that has gone into IntenseDebate!

More importantly, we’d like to thank you all for your continued support, alpha and beta testing, feedback, and for spreading the word about IntenseDebate. It goes without saying that IntenseDebate wouldn’t have even gotten off the ground without your help. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts for helping us make IntenseDebate what it is today. Infinite kudos to all of you!

So pop a bottle of champagne tonight and join us in toasting the New Year and all that’s to come in 2009!

We wish you all a happy New Year!
The Fellas at IntenseDebate

We’re excited to announce that you can now use IntenseDebate on Joomla powered sites! The credit goes to the team at RocketWerx who developed the RokIntenseDebate Comments plugin to easily allow integration of IntenseDebate comments in Joomla articles.




Using the plugin:

To use this plugin you must insert the {rokintensedebate} plugin text in the bottom of your article where you want the comments. You can use the Editor Button so you don’t even have to type it.

You can see the plugin in action here. Hats off to the team at RocketWerx!




We love seeing the community expand IntenseDebate into new areas. Have you done something interesting with IntenseDebate? Drop us a line and let us know about it.

Yet another revision of the IntenseDebate WordPress plugin is here.  So what’s different?  Quite a bit…

The most notable change is in the initial registration.  We’ve completely rebuilt the interface for initial registration of your blog with IntenseDebate to help make the process even easier and better explain what is happening during this one-time registration to clear up some confusion that was circling around the previous versions.  Below are a couple of screenshots of the new registration:

We’ve also addressed some display bugs when using our plugin with the latest 2.7 release of WordPress.

Additionally, we continue to improve the syncing between IntenseDebate and WordPress. We’ve now added a method to help us detect if your blog ends up out of sync with IntenseDebate and automatically correct the issue.

And last but not least we’ve heard your cries for XHTML validation and made some improvements to the code to address this, as well as alleviating some plugin conflicts with a handful of other plugins that conflicted with the previous version of our plugin.

If you’re an existing plugin user you can update from your Plugins page in your blog’s WordPress admin panel.  If not (or if you prefer to upgrade yourself) you can download the plugin here.  As always, give us your feedback!  We’d love to hear what you think and any suggestions you might have for making the integration with WordPress even better.

With the launch of the Brightcove Alliance, IntenseDebate comments can now be added to any Brightcove video player. That’s right, we’re bringing the debate to video content across the Web.

Brightcove is an online video platform that is used by media companies, businesses and organizations worldwide to publish and distribute video on the Web. Integrating IntenseDebate with the Brightcove video platform provides audiences with a unique opportunity to voice their opinions and engage in conversation around your media.

We are proud to offer innovative options for integrating IntenseDebate comments with other Web services to enhance your blog or website. As part of the Brightcove Alliance, IntenseDebate joins Brightcove in a commitment to revolutionizing the way your audience interacts with your content.

About the Brightcove Alliance


The Brightcove Alliance is a global ecosystem of leading technology and distribution partners who have integrated with the Brightcove online video platform, as well as solution providers building customer websites and video applications using Brightcove. Through the Brightcove Alliance, organizations worldwide have access to a broad range of expert partners, pre-integrated technologies and services to support online video initiatives of any size and scope in every market.

For more information about integrating IntenseDebate with your Brightcove video platform please get in contact with us!

For more information about Brightcove please visit take a look here get in contact with their sales department.

Our WordPress beta plugin is running better than ever! We have released the latest version of the IntenseDebate beta plugin for download so please upgrade your plugin. If you haven’t given IntenseDebate a try yet, then now is the perfect time!

What’s new?
Version 2.0.16 includes the following bug fixes and feature improvements:

• WordPress comments on mobile devices: We’ve added the ability to easily degrade back to the standard WordPress comment system for mobile browsers.  Not all mobile browsers support Javascript and this allows your mobile users to still get the full comment experience with the WordPress comment system, and our syncing features, while still having IntenseDebate enabled. Our mobile browsing feature is enabled by default and is located in your plugin settings page.

• Importing: We’ve added some fixes for the initial import which should help eliminate some of the errors people were receiving before.

• Theme Compatibilities: Some users were having issues with their theme being broken after activating our plugin.  In most of these cases the issue was caused by <noscript> tags in the comments template.  We’ve now added a check to catch this issue and output a stock comments template instead to prevent this issue in the future.

• We’ve also fixed a handful of bugs around the syncing process to make this system better than ever.

Thanks again for all of the great feedback. Keep it coming, we are always looking to improve our plugin. In addition to any feature enhancements, please contact us with any bug reports or styling issues and we’ll get everything taken care of.

The wait is over! We’re pleased to announce that IntenseDebate has emerged from temporary invite mode and is now available for the taking.

Since joining Automattic, we have been hard at work scaling our infrastructure and preparing IntenseDebate to deliver super-charged comments across the web.  You can finally inject some hi-octane conversational mojo into the standard comment system on your blog and website!

So what’s comment mojo magic all about? Have a look below (or at our Features page)!

done

WordPress Beta Plugin
We have also made our shiny new WordPress beta plugin available for download.  As a collaborative effort between both our IntenseDebate crew and the Crowd Favorite team, taking this beta plugin live marks the culmination of several months of hard work.  Hats off to everyone for a job well done and endless thanks to our alpha and beta testers!

So what’s the new plugin all about?

Two-Way Comment Sync

Comments made in IntenseDebate are automatically backed-up to your WordPress comment system, while your existing WordPress comments are automatically imported into IntenseDebate. You always have all of your comments so uninstalling is a one-click process if you change your mind.

Admin Panel Integration

Moderate and reply to IntenseDebate comments from your WordPress admin panel using our custom moderation page that looks and feels exactly like the WordPress page that you are used to. The only difference is the extra IntenseDebate zest we have added by including IntenseDebate avatars, reputation points, profile links and all of our other metadata gravy that you’ll love.

Search Engine Optimization

IntenseDebate outputs the standard WordPress comments enabling your comments to still be indexed by search engines that ignore JavaScript, while ensuring that visitors surfing with JavaScript disabled will be able to interact with comments made in IntenseDebate.

Trackbacks

Your trackbacks and pingbacks are all automatically synced to your IntenseDebate account so you won’t have to sacrifice one bit of link love by installing IntenseDebate.

Profile Sync

Create an account and login to IntenseDebate directly from WordPress! Syncing your accounts enables auto-login so logging into WordPress automatically logs you into IntenseDebate. Profile sync also means that comments you make are synchronized to both profiles so you maintain ownership of your profile.

Post Settings

WordPress admin settings like closing and opening comments on a post, and even changing your post titles, are automatically recognized and reflected in your IntenseDebate settings.

And even more feature goodness that we don’t have room for here. Interested in learning more about our WordPress beta plugin?  Have a look here!

done

It’s time to kick your old comment system to the curb and give IntenseDebate a try!  For more information please visit our help center.

It’s good to be back!

We experienced a brief outage this morning due to our server migration.  IntenseDebate is now back up and running, and you can rest assured that we’re up for the long haul.

Switching over servers last night went smoothly, however we overlooked a bug in the new configuration.  In the process of moving to our new infrastructure we implemented some newer technologies in our stack like nginx and php-fpm.  Luckily this issue was brought to light this morning and we were able to correct it quickly.

We apologize for the inconvenience.  This marks our final push over the the Automattic servers.  From here on out you can expect the same reliability and excellence in service that Automattic ensures with all of their products.

Thanks for your patience,
The ID Team

We’re extremely pleased to announce that IntenseDebate will now be joining the Automattic team! This is a big day for us and we couldn’t be more stoked about what it means for the future of IntenseDebate.

So what does this mean for you, our valued users? A couple of things:
1.) We will be temporarily going back into an invite only system. This won’t affect our current users, but new installs will require an invite code. This is just to give us a little time to ramp up the hardware and get our ducks in a row as we join the Automattic team.

2.) You’ll be seeing IntenseDebate a lot more often. We’re really excited about the distribution possibilities this opens up, so expect to see our comment system and use your IntenseDebate profile on a lot more blogs.

3.) You can look forward to tighter integration with some of the other Automattic joints including Akismet and Gravatar.

But don’t worry!
You will still be able to use IntenseDebate on Typepad, Tumblr, Blogger, Movable Type, and other platforms with more to come! We will continue to improve our comment system and your commenters’ experience. IntenseDebate will continue to enhance and encourage conversation on your blog and build your reader community.

It’s business as usual except we will be ramping up in size and features, and integrating more closely with other Automattic properties to provide an even better commenting experience. The IntenseDebate name and logo isn’t going anywhere – it’s just going to get way more Intense! It’s been a long road to get here, but we’re just getting started…

The fellas decided it was a good idea to send me to Las Vegas to represent IntenseDebate at this year’s BlogWorld Expo! Can you believe it? Man do I have them fooled. Gotta love a job that sends you to Vegas.

Make sure you stop by our booth and say what’s up! I’ll have some t-shirt’s and we’ll be having the real “What Would You Do For An IntenseDebate T-Shirt” Contest. It’s Vegas so who knows what’s going to happen. There’s a good chance that it could get weird.

So come on by the Las Vegas Convention Center this Saturday, Saturday, Saturday, and Sunday, Sunday, Sunday and let’s get funky in Vegas. If I’m not at the booth it’s because Vegas got the best of me. Please let the rest of the team know so they can send out a search and rescue party.

Just kidding.

But not really.

At IntenseDebate we’re all about shaking hands, kissing babies, and contributing to the community. I may be stating the obvious here, but IntenseDebate cares (period). With that in mind we are extremely pleased to pledge one percent of our overall equity to the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado.

EFCO (as it’s known in the halls of many a Colorado high school) is a philanthropic program with the mission of assisting entrepreneurs and start-ups in giving back to the community. I can’t explain it better than how the good folks at EFCO describe their mission:

Rather than wait for success to encourage philanthropic activity, at which point the successful entrepreneur is likely to be besieged by requests, we decided to create a new program to help all entrepreneurs contribute early in the creation of their companies to the long term health and sustainability of Colorado.

Along with our fellow EFCO members, we are delighted to have the opportunity to contribute and become involved at this stage in our company.

Yeah that’s right, we’re IntenseDebate and we bring change you can believe in.