By the way, your blog design here is beautiful.

Once, I emailed support about a minor bug, and they responded promptly. They instructed me to send them my template so they could examine the code and fix the issue. Three weeks later, I still hadn’t heard back from them. I assumed they couldn’t fix the problem, so I decided to just live with the bug.

One day, a test post was published to my account. I saw that the post didn’t actually appear on my blog. I clicked the title, and it lead me to a what appeared to be a sandbox site dedicated to testing IntenseDebate. I figured that the IntenseDebate support team was testing my template code to make sure it worked before sending the template back to me.

Imagine my confusion when, the next day, I started getting tons of comments from multiple users for a post that didn’t exist and never had existed on my blog! I clicked the post title listed on the comments, and it took me to another person’s blog. Obviously, the comments that were supposed to be associated with her account for her blog were coming to mine instead, as if our blog wires had gotten crossed. I notified the woman by email. She explained that, after having serious, repeated functionality issues with IntenseDebate comments, she’d sent her template to support so they could reinstall the comment system on it. At the time, Blogspot had recently come out with their new, fancier templates. I’m guessing that the IntenseDebate support team was not yet that familiar with it, and thus was using my code (in which IntenseDebate was correctly installed) as a reference. Somehow during the process, they must have managed to get my code into her template.

Each of us contacted support multiple times by email, and were shocked when neither of us EVER received a reply. We tried to fix it ourselves, but we never could figure out what the issue is. The User ID on her blog wasn’t the same as mine. It was an inconvenience to her to have to rely on someone else to control her comments, and it was probably a bigger inconvenience to me and confusion for my readers to have the comments for someone else’s blog filling up my “Recent Comments” widget, and for my readers who were subscribed to my comments feed to keep getting email notifications for comments for someone else’s completely unrelated blog. After nearly two weeks of this aggravation (during which time we still had not received a reply from support), the woman decided to permanently uninstall IntenseDebate. After the horrible incident and lack of support, I wanted to do the same – but realized I was stuck. I couldn’t import my IntenseDebate comments into Blogspot because the Comment Importer tool was disabled, a fact IntenseDebate neglected to mention. They still list the Importer as a feature in their FAQ section and other areas of the site, which is false advertising; I wouldn’t have installed IntenseDebate in the first place had I known I’d lose all comments if I decided I didn’t like it and wanted to uninstall. My only option for getting my comments back was to buy a domain and install the self-hosted version of WordPress, and then use the plugin importer.

Some users told me they were happy at the switch, because they couldn’t even SEE the IntenseDebate comments the whole time I had them, especially the users. Three people had complained to me while I had it that they had trouble commenting. That made me think the trouble may have been more widespread.

The moral of the story is that it’s better not to rely on third parties to deliver essential content to your blog. If things go screwy (which they probably will eventually) then you’re just screwed. Google won’t help you undo the damage you did to your blog with this buggy third party software.

On one level, I’m glad I’m not the only one having trouble with ID..i was starting to think it was just me!

Unfortunately, I haven’t had anything to do with Intense Debate since I quit using the plugin. Sorry.

Thanks

Been using IDC for nearly a year now.

It took a little while to get the moderation settings dialed in (too many comments caught Vs spam getting through), but after that it works well 90% of the time.

…but that 10%…hoo-boy. Comments disappear, comments show up in the “Recent Comments” widget, but aren’t on the page, the “reply via email” function only kinda works (usually with a 2 hour delay), the “email when someone replies” function seems to only work for about 8 hours after a comment.

We’re a car site, so I tend to refer to IDC as the “Alfa Romeo of commenting systems” beautiful and awesome…when it’s working.

There are also complaints from the more militantly open-source, privacy-centric, anti-commercial users of wordpress that IDC amounts to a trojan horse, collecting all kinds of personal data for some kind of nefarious commercial purpose.

If native WP comments could do the whole (or even most of) the IDC feature set, I’d drop them like a hot lug nut.
(lug nuts get hot when you take them off with an impact wrench)