Increasing Comments On Your Blog with Intense Debate
shoemoney
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4 min read
ShoeMoney Note: This is a guest post by business owner and MMA figther, Jenise Uehara. In a recent Elite Retreat mastermind correspondence Jenise revealed that since they started using intense debate on some of their blogs the comments had exploded. I have never been a big fan of these comment systems but asked her if she would not mind doing a guest post talking about it and how it works for them.
Visitors to our Pastry Shoes fansite seemed to love using our little java chat box in the sidebar to shout out to other visitors or to make comments on products. However they did not use the Wordpress article commenting feature much, and when they did the conversations never seemed to take off. Although we have loyal repeat visitors (mostly 10-20 yo females) they didn't acknowledge or talk much to each other. We wanted more article commenting in order to promote a broader sense of community.
While in search of a solution we came across IntenseDebate on Chris Winfield's site. IntenseDebate is a free Wordpress plug-in that gives you enhanced comment management and cool user profile features. We decided to give it a shot.
Installation is very simple. Just grab the plugin and register. IntenseDebate will sync your existing comments with their hosted service. It takes a few minutes to a few hours depending on the number you already have. Once completed you'll automatically get the new comment box and layout on each post.
We installed IntenseDebate on the site in December 2008. To kick it off, we launched a "comment lottery", where every comment counted as a contest entry for prizes. We also removed the chat box from the sidebar replacing it instead with a top 10 commenters list.
We immediately saw a 5x increase in both commenters and comments. No doubt this was boosted by the lure of winning free merchandise but we feel it was key in motivating users to create profiles, upload profile images and learn to use and reply to comments.
Growth was sustained long after the contest was over. Comments on the site today are nearly double what they were before IntenseDebate. A few monthly comment count stats are below.
Note that IntenseDebate is a hosted service. Any time you add an externally hosted service to your site you are then dependent on the host to provide a robust and fast service. Over the past 6mo IntenseDebate has occasionally been slow or even down, and in turn has caused our site to be slow or even hang a few times, although never for more than just a few minutes.
In recent months it's been problem-free and for us (so far) the benefits have been outweighing the risks. We'll continue to monitor their uptime.
A nice feature is the OpenID and Twitter integration. Visitors with existing OpenID and Gravatar profiles can login on your site without having to re-register. Their profiles can also be used on any other site with IntenseDebate. Visitors can configure their profile to auto-update their Twitter stream with their comments. Additionally, reply-by-email is a favorite visitor feature on our Urban Clothing site. Our authors are able to monitor and respond directly via email to commenters on their articles.
IntenseDebate seems to be able to handle large volumes of comments per article pretty well; here is an example. Note the reputation scoring and the ability to for others to vote positively or negatively on individual comments which affects the commenter's profile.
One downside we've noticed is that the spam/filter functionality is not as intelligent as Akismet. G-rated comments with slang in them are put in the moderation queue, while other comments with 4-letter words get published
automatically.
Lastly, the comments are synced two-way and this is a good thing. This means all the comments will be stored locally in your wordpress instance so you won't lose them if you uninstall IntenseDebate for whatever reason. Your old comment templates will work again just fine. IntenseDebate is not without its flaws but it has worked out well for us overall (plus you can't beat the price). :)
-J
Visitors to our Pastry Shoes fansite seemed to love using our little java chat box in the sidebar to shout out to other visitors or to make comments on products. However they did not use the Wordpress article commenting feature much, and when they did the conversations never seemed to take off. Although we have loyal repeat visitors (mostly 10-20 yo females) they didn't acknowledge or talk much to each other. We wanted more article commenting in order to promote a broader sense of community.
While in search of a solution we came across IntenseDebate on Chris Winfield's site. IntenseDebate is a free Wordpress plug-in that gives you enhanced comment management and cool user profile features. We decided to give it a shot.
Installation is very simple. Just grab the plugin and register. IntenseDebate will sync your existing comments with their hosted service. It takes a few minutes to a few hours depending on the number you already have. Once completed you'll automatically get the new comment box and layout on each post.
We installed IntenseDebate on the site in December 2008. To kick it off, we launched a "comment lottery", where every comment counted as a contest entry for prizes. We also removed the chat box from the sidebar replacing it instead with a top 10 commenters list.
We immediately saw a 5x increase in both commenters and comments. No doubt this was boosted by the lure of winning free merchandise but we feel it was key in motivating users to create profiles, upload profile images and learn to use and reply to comments.
Growth was sustained long after the contest was over. Comments on the site today are nearly double what they were before IntenseDebate. A few monthly comment count stats are below.
| Sep 2008 | 1438 |
| Oct 2008 | 1629 |
| Nov 2008 | 1689 |
| Dec 2008 | 8390 |
| Jan 2009 | 3618 |
| Feb 2009 | 3397 |
| Mar 2009 | 3222 |
| Apr 2009 | 2904 |
| May 2009 | 3068 |