The awesome people over at Automattic have migrated our Intense Debate comments manually over since you all were way too commenty for the ID exporter. This means we are ready to make the jump to Disqus now that Intense Debate is no longer being supported.
We love intense debate (even if it has been kinda buggy over the years), but the system seems to have been largely dropped, with no plans to update it to new web requirements being rolled out by Google and friends soon. That wipe of 3 days of comments is an example. Already it is breaking some things on EQD. We've looked at other commenting options, and Disqus seems to be the most used, and best.
Below the break, we go over what you should do to prepare for the switch!
What you need to know:
- For the best experience, make a Disqus account. You can also login with Google/facebook/twitter/yahoo/wordpress and a bunch of other systems, or just as guest.
- Intense Debate Comments will be migrated over the next few days, until then Leon has an archive link below each old post for ID comments. Follow him on Twitter for techy specifics.
- All Intense Debate comments will be migrated over time. If something derps, we have archives linked on each page until it is fixed. You all comment a lot, so it will take a while.
- Blogger comments will be returned too for old posts before 2011. This will most likely happen after intense debate.
- The EQD app has already been updated to support it (You need to download 1.5.0 or newer of the app though - Android / iOS )
What Disqus improves:
- Way more account logins
- Way easier to login. There were always endless bugs with Facebook and Twitter logins with ID.
- Less randomly getting moderated
- Regular updates to keep it improved
- Much more stable overall
- Supports all the new web bells and whistles
So overall, its a pretty big step in the "modern" direction.
There are one or two things bothering us about Disqus though. They use that modern "show more comments" button that everyone is upgrading to now days. I don't like it over pages. We are looking at a way to hack pages back in, but it's difficult to do. Until then, your best plan is to use the sorters to get to new discussion.
With how many comments an EQD post can get (especially nightly/morning discussion), "show more" might be a little weird to navigate at first. If you have ever used Youtube's comments, you know what to expect there. We will need to sort by newest first just to give those comments a chance to live for a bit. We can tweak this as we figure out more. It seems all new commenting systems that work with what we have are on this system now.
If you want to test out your account, Desudaily already has it set up.
We will be tweaking a lot of things to see what works and doesn't work within, so please bare with us as we make the migration. It's hard on us to change to something new too.
Like all things, change is hard. But no longer will we have to worry about waking up tomorrow and finding intense debate exploded.
We are aiming at adding them tomorrow morning!
