Intense Debate or Disquss : Pumping Up Your Comments

Recently we decided to pump up the comment section of our blog. The comment section is one section which really needs attention in case of blogs. Without comments your blog is dormant. So the more you make it easy for your readers to comment, the more your blog comes to life. Comments also increases pageviews for your blog, by bringing back the readers which previously commented and have subscribed by email to the future comments in that post. Comments are very necessary to build engagement of users around your content. Most of the blogs today don’t use the default commenting system of wordpress for this reason only, that it is cumbersome for users to enter their details all over again to comment.We wanted something nice that can integrate comment poster avatars (Gravatars), Facebook, Twitter posting of comments, multithreaded comments, reply by email and some more features.

The only two good solutions that came to surface were IntenseDebate and Disqus. These are very popular in terms of customizations they both provide in the comments section. They both enable multi-threaded comments, reply by email, Facebook, OpenID and Twitter integrations and many more. The next point was what should we really use? What was better?. Finally we decided to go with IntenseDebate for the following reasons:

• It is from the Automattic Inc., the creators of wordpress, on which this blog runs.
• Being supported by Automattic, it certainly will be seeing many more future updates in the future and good support for problems.
• You can integrate friendfeed also with this.
• IntenseDebate has got better visual appeal, comment threads have a better overall look and feel.

You can also integrate IntenseDebate with Blogspot, Tumblr and Typepad blogs. Though Disqus can integrate with many more..

The installation of Intense Debate is very easy. We will be telling about its setup process in the next post.

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