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Why were not liking IntenseDebate

We installed IntenseDebate last night, tried a few things and decided to deactivate it. It’s a comment system add-on for blogs. I got this email a few minutes later:

I noticed that you deactivated your IntenseDebate plugin. Is there any particular reason why? Was everything working properly? We would really appreciate any feedback on how to improve our plugin.

Kind regards,
Michael

Dear Michael,

Okay I reactivated it for a real test run, but sure, Michael, here:

  1. My pages don’t validate.
  2. YSlow rated my pages a “D”. (50K of Javascript on a primed cache, ID scripts aren’t minified, IntenseDebate elements have no expires headers, elements are from “intensedebate.com” and “www.intensedebate.com” (two DNS lookups), JS on the HEAD, and so forth. Check out YSlow and find out yourself.)

    Do you know that Google’s search pages only have one CSS image (
    http://www.google.com/images/nav_logo3.png )? You have nine!

  3. New comments don’t sync back to my database, so my home page wordpress widgets show old data.
  4. New comments from those who have javascript off don’t appear in IntenseDebate.
  5. I can’t find comment permalinks.
  6. Comment permalinks don’t work in IE6 or Firefox 3.
  7. Gravatars increase page load times, we want them disabled, because people rarely have them anyway.

I’ll let you know if I find more. If something is wrong on my end or
if my host doesn’t support IntenseDebate, then please let me know.

EHB

P.S. We use WordPress 2.6, and doesn’t support wp-cron.php (i.e., they block cron requests from WP). Our host’s clock is in GMT but the blog is in GMT-8.

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Comments 10

  1. eharmonyblog wrote:

    Time is UTC (5:25pm) PST (9:25am)

    Posted 15 Nov 2008 at 5:25 am
  2. eharmonyblog wrote:

    Time is UTC (6:38am) PST (10:39pm)

    Posted 15 Nov 2008 at 10:39 pm
  3. daveevans wrote:

    I tried ID over the weekend, it didn't work so well, so I tried Disqus, which I have on another of my blogs. That wasn't importing well so I went back to plain old WP comments with a few supporting plugins. Sometimes simple is good.

    Posted 17 Nov 2008 at 10:16 am
  4. eharmonyblog wrote:

    I tried Disqus too. I'm keeping ID for a while. I think they are just having growing pains. IntenseDebate has already overtaken Disqus in Quantcast traffic by leaps and bounds, so if we do go back to plain WP comments we're still going to try ID again.

    Posted 18 Nov 2008 at 2:03 am
  5. daveevans wrote:

    Someone on my blog was able to log in and post comments as me at MyBlogLog, not sure if it had to do with ID but still. All these comments companies, really not thinking things through. Great job calling them out about javascript and Yslow. Most if these issues are programming 101 issues, always makes me cringe when I see these basic problems out in the wild.

    Posted 18 Nov 2008 at 3:41 am
  6. eharmonyblog wrote:

    Time is UTC (7:04am) PST (11:04pm)

    Posted 17 Nov 2008 at 11:04 pm
  7. eharmonyblog wrote:

    Thanks. I'm conversing with them now regarding the syncing and the permalink issues. That they are open to discussing their shortcomings with users publicly keeps me loyal. (eHarmony doesn't so much, publicly… but eHarmony Advice is opening itself to more transparency. That's awesome.)

    I'm seeing no adverse effect from ID on my traffic numbers, so they are staying a while. We're going to dabble on its CSS this weekend.

    Posted 18 Nov 2008 at 7:32 am
  8. SingleGuyInNC wrote:

    As I move from post to post on the blog, it "remembers" the last comment I posted in the post a new comment textbox, which doesn't seem to make sense to me as a feature…

    I was a little bummed that I had to sign up for yet another account somewhere and have to jump through hoops to be able to post comments again but it seems to work okay and not be too horrible. Not sure what our other frequent commenters will think about this.

    Posted 19 Nov 2008 at 11:13 am
  9. Lutvi Avandi wrote:

    I’m using this plugin yesterday and it is work find. My visitor like this new comment style. They said my blog in cool.

    I also integrate it with twitter and facebook and it is also well going.

    Posted 14 Jul 2009 at 8:15 pm
  10. Kevin Kerekes wrote:

    Hi I would like to request younger matches,such as late20′s,and early 30′s I want to meet younger women who like older men.Tnanks.

    Posted 25 Feb 2011 at 10:26 am

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