For me comments are lifeline of a blog. Blog without comments is no more then a lifeless statue in a park. But getting comments is not an easy job. Now you can make it easy. You can get better comments.
Mostly as far as I have seen it does not matter how much good and useful content you have until you can attract people to comment on your blog. To inspire your visitors to comments you should inspire them. Only inspiration won’t do. You have to make it easy for them to comment on your blog. Until now I was using Bloggers comment system. It is not very much convenient and you need to click more then 3 times to comment on the blog. Wordpress users are lucky in this case to have a good easy to use commenting system and you are done with your work in only 2 clicks. I am not saying you (Blogger user) to use Wordpress. For those on Blogger and Typepad blog hosting I have a very good commenting system. I myself am using it now. This commenting system is called Intense Debate. It is as simple as Wordpress commenting system and with far more features than any other commenting system so far I have seen. Wordpress user can use it too. Today’s review is on this Commenting system.
Guess what, Intense Debate (Founders: Jon Fox, Josh Morgan, and Isaac Keyet) is all free.I recommend to all Blogger platform users because it user-friendly system. It has got lots of feature too. They now support Open ID. It also features Me.dium & Orkut Integration, Reply-By-Email, Lijit integration and Twitter Integration. Well just have a look at some of the astonishing feature of it as a list below.
1. Structure: The Intense Debate comment system is built to enable conversation within the comment section in addition to the normal commenting. This is one of my favourite features.
2. Profiles: With Intense Debate, a user can set up an avatar to be shown whenever they make a comment on every site we power. Also find out more about the other commentators around you. It helps to connect with your friends.
3. Reputation / Comment voting: Each user also has a reputation attached to their identity that is displayed whenever they make a comment. It will help you determine how good the commentator is.
4. Social traffic drive: They enable you to link to several major social sites you are a part of to give fellow readers an idea of who you are. In simple words you get more targeted traffic now.
5. Widgets: They have got some lovely widgets which shows Top commentators (I always wanted this), last few comments and total comment counts.
Ok so you have seen the features.Here is an example of how the comments will look. Have a look at right side image. I have integrated Intense Debate on my blog as well. Now every new post will have Intense Debate as its commenting system including today’s post. You can just have a look at it on the permanent link of this post. Now I did forgot to tell you one important thing, this commenting system works not only on blog but any other websites. It has very good spam protection system. Well I have a funny statement from them about spamming comments. They say “Since this is a new comment system spam bots don't know how to post spam directly to it yet. When they do, they will be met with our spam prevention solution.” It looks they are challenging spammers. It has a better moderation system. They have good support system and also have a forum to solve your doubts and problems.
You are eager to try this system. Ok you can get the system at Intense Debate but wait I advice you to read the tips, warnings and advice below.
Tips: First watch their 2 minutes intro Video. They have two ways of integrating the commenting system on your blog. One is widget and other is template coding. Both the ways are hassle free. I recommend using template coding if you are good at HTML and CSS. If you are not brave enough then use the widget. I am using template integration. If you still have doubts of if it will look good on your blog or not then they have a try out code for you too. Just use it.
Warning: If you are blogging for more then 2-3 months and have many comments on your blog(25+) then while installing this comment system use “All new posts ” because their import comment is currently in beta. I am on Blogger and have got nearly 98 comments. When I tried to import comments, it showed than all comments were imported but in reality many comments were not imported.
Advice: I advice you to read an article. It is a tutorial on How to Install Intense Debate Comments in Blogger Blogs
