New Comment System

The comments are different. More on this later today. Should be fun.

Check out Intense Debate to learn more in the meantime.

UPDATE:

Ok, so here’s the deal. WordPress (the engine that drives this beast of a website) has a pretty terrible comment system. No avatars, no ratings, no profiles, no threads, etc, etc. It’s just bad. I’ve added some functionality to it (like threading) but it’s still hard to tell who’s saying what to whom and harder still to get to know regular commenters on the site. I want to foster the sense of community developing around Hijinks Ensue and I think commenting has to be fun and friendly to make that a reality.

Enter Intense Debate. Basically ID replaces the default WordPress comment system with a better one.

Features:

• Threaded comments
• RSS feeds per comment thread OR PER USER!
• Emailed Updates
• User Friends
• User Profiles with avatars, and links to your other social networks
• User rankng system with D&D XP or some such nonsense!
• Your profile follows you to other blogs using ID (no one is using it so don’t worry about this)

Signing Up:

If you are a regular commenter, I suggest you sign up with ID. It takes about 30 seconds and has some pretty cool benefits for interacting with other Hijinks Ensue readers.

The coolest part is that you can sign up with your OpenID. You probably have one and don’t know it. Sites like Yahoo, Flickr, Livejournal and pretty much everyone else use OpenID.

You can also choose to NOT sign up and comment just like always by typing in your nick and email address. The best part is if you ever decide to sign up you get to inherit all your previous comments.

The End Result:

I’m going to try this for at least a couple of weeks. If it sucks I can import all the ID comments back into WordPress and get rid of ID.

You guys are going to decide if this is the way we want to go. Try it out, put ID through its paces and let me know what you think.

All comments on posts prior to TODAY will remain WordPress standard comments. ID says you can import them, but I don’t trust that feature yet so I am leaving well enough alone in that respect. If this takes off, I may contact them about importing and somehow trying to associate previous comments with current commenters.