intense debate or disqus, which commenting system is better?

Congrats on the open beta! Intense debate looks awesome, and I am looking forward to installing it on my own blog. As soon as trackbacks are available, I'm sold. :)

-ewH

*situations like this :)

It would be nice to be able to either preview a comment or edit it. I suppose you don't want people to edit their comments forever, but maybe the feature could be available for a couple of minutes. This feature would eliminate situatenz....

When you guys decide to start opening up to more beta testers, it would be cool to give your current beta users some invites to give out. Bloggers eat this stuff up and it's a great way of viral marketing. Just a friendly suggestion. :)

In My Profile, it would be nice to have an aggregated view/rss feed of not only my comments, but all the replies to them as well. Along that same line of thinking, it would be great to have an aggregated feed of all posts that I left comments on. Since this could potentially grow too large in size, it would probably need the ability to include/exclude certain comment streams from your aggregated feed.

From a blogger's perspective, intense debate provides great tracking and stats, but I see more potential for intense debate from a commenter's point of view. The biggest gap for me as I comment on people's blogs is being able to track responses. This is where the lack of any kind of real debate comes into play. Because I have to remember a) remember where I commented and b) remember to keep going to check if anyone responded. This is already starting to be solved by intense debate since I have a profile view of everywhere I have commented. However, it would be truly valuable if I could now subscribe to "my comment and replies" feed to keep me in the loop. Subscribing to every comment thread is available, but that gets unruly and hard to manage very quickly. A federated/aggregated feed would be money!

Cheers! -ewH

I'm not sure these "drawbacks" explained in this article have any real validation.

1) tracking/user profiling & phishing - these are issues/concerns/problems or whatever you want to call it with any site now. They are Internet problems, not OpenID problems. Like the article says, if you don't like tracking, don't use Google either. As for phishing, you still have to use common sense and make sure that the server you are logging into is actually the server you created your OpenID with. This is especially hard to spoof since all OpenID servers do not look the same. Just checking the URI should be enough of a clue. This is a common sense issue, and is not specific to OpenID. If I knew your email address and password from ebay, I could probably go to 100 different sites and log on the same. Sure, putting all your eggs in one basket makes it more risky when you have been victimized, but if that's the argument then we might as well just wait until everything is authenticated with biometric scanners. :)

2) Usability/Reliability - this is not OpenID specific either. This is an implementation issue of specific OpenID servers or sites using OpenID. This again does not validate any true concern of the OpenID technology itself.

3) Identity Theft - this is the most ridiculous argument from the whole post. If I have a URI that is already mine, like http://jonnyworkboots.myopenid.com, then nobody can use this URI without knowing my password. Of course there is no way I can make someone not sign up as http://jonnyworkboots.anotheropenidserver.com, but is that identity theft? I could go to intense debate right now and sign up as georgewbush@gmail.com, but did I "steal" his identity? My unique name is my URL. If anything, this makes identity theft less likely. There is nothing stopping me from going to 100 sites right now and signing up as lifehacker. But if they had the URI http://lifehacker.myopenid.com as their unique identifier, then there is no way for me to use that in any other OpenID enabled site without first authenticating. Again, it's just a ridiculous argument.

I understand the concerns, but to me OpenID, while maybe not solving all Internet identity problems, doesn't really introduce many new ones.

In the Blog URL field, if someone not logged in puts an improperly formed URL in, different weird things happen.

1) if you just put in any word without a dot, like "foo", you just get a popup that says "Error". It looks like an uncaught exception because of parsing the url field by the dot.

2) if you leave off the "http://" of the url off, like "foo.bar", it is appended to the url of the blog post. For example if my blog post is found at http://myblog/thisisapost and I put foo.bar into the blog url field, my blog URL shows up as http://myblog/thisisapost/foo.bar

I guess the end result is that there needs to be better validation/error notification around the blog url field for comments left by non-logged in commenters.

Supporting OpenID is an EXCELLENT idea for the casual commenter who doesn't want to use all the cool tracking features and advantages of being an Intense Debate user.

I suppose you could also just allow people to sign up for Intense Debate using their existing Open ID as well. Then you get the best of both worlds.

A search feature on this forum