I’m eyeballing IntenseDebate.com, recently acquired by WordPress, who offer a hosted third-party blog/website commenting service, and am starting to wonder whether it might be a good idea to write a Plone add-on product that integrated IntenseDebate as a commenting system for Plone.
It seems like there would be some pros and cons. What do you think? Worth the effort or a waste of time?
Jon Stahl's Journal
Politics, the environment, technology, activism. And stuff.
+1 for IntenseDebate.
We use them to provide commenting on all of Fisher Communications’ sites. We evaluated them against Disqus, js-kit, HaloScan, and another firm whose name escapes me at the moment. IntenseDebate’s service won, our integration (which was done in custom JavaScript, as Fisher’s sites are outsourced to a proprietary CMS right now) was fairly easy, and they’ve been great to work with.
There have been some catches along the way, but each time IntenseDebate was very responsive, and super reasonable.
I’m not sure if you’re asking for opinions on writing a Plone product, or on using them for site commenting in general… These meta-site commenting systems benefit from inter-site aggregation. The business model relies (or, will rely, once ads are implemented) on contextual advertising based not only on the page’s content, but also on the pages the reader has visited, which ones he/she commented on (and, hence, was extremely interested in), and their comments’ content. And in fact, if the Ajax code is done right, the ads can be based on what they’re entering into the comment text box right now. E.g., if you often post comments on ski websites, chances are you’re a ski bum and would want to see skiing ads.
There’s also the recognition that a commenter is a more active participant in a website (they’re taking the time to register with a commenting system, enter a comment, reply to other users’ comments, etc.), and hence their eyeballs (regardless of the ad contextuality) are more valuable.
Site commenting can be a PITA to get working correctly, and as a user, having to sign in at every %^&*%^( site I want to comment on is a PITAx10^6. Meta-site commenting solutions are well worth it, and I give IntenseDebate an unequivocal thumbs-up.
John,
Thanks for the great experience… I’m thinking specifically of whether it is worthwhile to think about writing a solid Plone integration plugin, along the lines of the tight integration they’ve got with WordPress now. Sounds like you’d be +1.
Do you see any potential downsides? Loss of control (or at least having to do import/export)? The fact that commenters aren’t registering with you, depriving you of the chance to follow up/build relationship?
Yes, absolutely I’m a +1! Integration using raw JavaScript is easy for us propellor-heads, but we’re not normal.
A Plone product would be tres cool.
You’ll need to allow the site developer (or integrator? I see development roles as having much fuzzier boundaries than others do) to make the markup-based layout selections, on a site plug-in dashboard. Most of the choices (e.g., whether comments trail the post within the page, or pop up in a frame when the user wants to view them) are selected from a dashboard hosted on the IntenseDebate site. But some are implemented in the page markup itself, so, you’ll have to provide a plugin settings page. Maybe it can be just a bunch of checkboxes.
All of these meta-commenting services provide a way to export comments from their service, usually in XML. So, you can backup your sites’ comments, if you wish. Users build a relationship with you based on your content, not on being locked in to your commenting system. If your site’s good, your users will come back. If it sucks, they won’t. The commenting mechanism is irrelevant. And in fact, these meta-commenting systems make it easier for them to comment, and to come back. E.g., they can elect to get e-mail if another comment is posted in the thread they’ve commented on.
There are three pragmatic downsides, however. One is that the comment creation is done via a JavaScript call to the IntenseDebate servers. That will take more time, presumably, than doing it right on the origin server. So there’s a slight delay on the page as the comments are filled in. The lag is acceptable, but it’s there. The code to display “Comments(45)” type text is also a server call, so, if you have a page with a lot of headlines (like, oh, say, on a news site
) then each one of those “comments(xxx)” links is a separate call to the remote server. Not good. For most sites however, this won’t be an issue.
The second downside is that unless you’re a big player, you won’t get an SLA out of these services. IntenseDebate has been super reliable, but, let’s be clear, without an SLA you’re at the mercy of the goodness of the other company’s management. (That’s true for any third-party service.)
The third downside is, if they go out of business, you need to re-implement commenting on your site with another system, and import your backed-up comment content into it. That will be a non-trivial PITA. Unlikely, but included here for completeness’ sake.
+1, thumbs up, go for it!
Arg, make that “propeller-heads.”
http://seeknuance.com/2008/08/12/intensedebates-blog-commenting-technology/ is something I wrote in August about our selection of IntenseDebate.
We had the same discussion a while back about making a Disqus commenting integration product. Would probably be easy to combine the two into the same product.
For certain audiences, it makes perfect sense, since they may already participate in other blogs or sites that have the same setup.
It also makes caching easier, and if we ever get the big “static deployment” button, this is the best way to add commenting — and search would be handled by Google Custom Search.
KCRW seems to already be using Disqus with Plone: http://www.nathanlubeck.com/tag/disqus/
@Alex,
Being acquired by WordPress seems like a pretty major boost on the way to “mainstream” acceptance, so it seems like worth thinking a bit more about again.
Yes, I know it came up a while back.
If the service provides a comments export like John described, I wonder how hard it would be to take a hybrid approach where comments are managed and displayed via the third-party tool, but also indexed in the portal catalog (either just a # of comments for display in listings, or maybe even fulltext for searching).
Jon Fox of IntenseDebate here. Just wanted to chime in and let you know that it should be pretty easy to do an integration. The comments are a simple javascript insert and we have an API I’d be happy to plug you into if you’d like to do anything involving moving data around.
Let me know if I can help in any way.
From http://blog.intensedebate.com/2008/12/24/rokintensedebate-comments-on-joomla/:
“We’re excited to announce that you can now use IntenseDebate on Joomla powered sites! The credit goes to the team at RocketWerx who developed the RokIntenseDebate Comments plugin to easily allow integration of IntenseDebate comments in Joomla articles.”
This commenting service is very great, all of my blogs installed it now, I and my visitors are very love it.