[Plugin: IntenseDebate Comments] NEVER again

this is really tiring
if a plugin does not work or for some reason you don’t like it – un-install it and move on
why come here and bash the plugin/author.
Many folks use this plugin trouble free and as you pointed out is free.
Because you are not satisfied is no reason to try to queer everyone on it

I have to disagree.

I appreciate knowing that there is an issue. While I don’t think we need or can assign motive or intention to the developers, I do like knowing that these issues could pose a problem.

It can save us a lot of time and aggravation.

I disagree too. It’s important for others to share their experiences – good and bad. If everyone kept their mouth shut how would you expect WordPress (and everything related) to improve?

Q: Why do you think WordPress even has a post comments feature?
Q: Why are there forums all over the Internet?
Q: Why are there numerous corporations/magazines/bogs/etc. serving consumer demand for knowledge?

A: To help you make informed decisions and learn something.

samboll: I see you are a moderator here. I find it puzzling that you would stifle another person’s opinion on something that is completely relevant to these forums. If people can’t express their opinion and share there knowledge here, we all might as well pack up and go home.

Lighten up will ya?

I am not sure why I have to sign up for an outside site to use this, is it similar to Disqus?

I agree 100% with CactusCarl, it is very important to share opinions freely, funny that the plugin is called “intense debate”, apparently not allowed by moderators here.

I intensely dislike the commercial, non-open source nature of this plugin and I’m not even sure they should be listed here on www.remarpro.com as they are looking for a profit. How about me advertising my services here on www.remarpro.com for free? That’s what IntenseDebate is doing, this plugin operates like a trojan horse stealing users and content from your site, and no, it’s not free: you pay dearly with the statistics and users they harvest from your site.

Rori: yes, similar.

Samboli, I think is off-line considering the fact that these forums exist for people to give comments in the first place. Some people have a bone to pick, for certain, but others can be so flattering that their judgement is seen to be clouded as well.

Anyway, on to my real concern – bolonki – your comment made me want to go an uninstall ID right away. But then I thought about things and realized that if I were to do that I might as well uninstall wp.com stats and akismet spam, and likely WP altogether, since these plugins come from organizations that find a way to earn money from open source software.

OSS isn’t necessarily going to be 100% free.

Hey MichellIrons, there is a BIG difference: akismet and wp stats don’t try to STEAL your users away like IntenseDebate does, they recruit your users into their social network. Very gullible, “fanboy” naive people here, it’s a pity. Automattic bought the IntenseDebate company to exploit the weakness of WP in that area, not out of a desire to improve the open source side (it’s death to open source comment developement as far as WP goes) but out of an intense desire to make money. They tried to stop designers from selling “premium” themes, apparently they don’t apply the same ethics when they slowly colonize the open source platform with trojan commercial plugins like Akismet, Gravatar, stats, comments, and there is more to come will not be on open source. What’s the ethics of a COMMERCIAL plugin being distributed as DEFAULT on an open source platform? How about that blog that gets the real “plugs” on the Dashboard, shamelessly directing thousands of users to a blog with little content but chock full of AdSense? Why is it always THAT blog? But this money-making drive without ethics is not new, I remember when in 2005 Matt was caught stuffing hundreds of hideen links on this very site www.remarpro.com, the “sacrosanct” open source project.

Time for someone to fork out a LitePress like they used to have in 2006, imitate the Joomla move abandoning Mambo.

My concern is that WordPress is becoming Automattically buggier and more bloated with each new release, with CPU and DB queries quickly growing to ridiculous Drupal-like heights. At this rate, WordPress will only be a good match for blogs that have negiligible traffic or sites with major resources (like WordPress.com) but not for middle of the road sites. Even a simple thing like showing Recent comments is going to cost you one MySQL call per comment you want to show, you want to show the last 20 comments? Ok, that’s 20 MORE database calls. Meanwhile vBulletin creates pages with 9 queries total. What happened to “CODE is POETRY”? Good code may be poetry, but WP’s looking like a procedurally verbose rant! The leaders saw dollars and Automattically abandoned WordPress as an open source project.

Though I appreciate the pleas of some who have posted here asking for moderation in the tone of the discussion, I am nonetheless going to come down on the side of speki and bolonki, who have raised some serious issues with respect to Intense Debate which must be recognized within the WordPress community. I am convinced there is something gravely wrong with Intense Debate and I am not just referring to its persistent “buggy” behavior, which I too have encountered.

Like speki and bolonki I have seen the persistent problems with the use of Intense Debate and I am also quite familiar with the near total absence of meaningful support from tekkies at the the plug-in’s site. And I would like to add one important criticism of my own, which is that the documentation available at Intense Debate is so lacking as to make it nearly worthless. It practically qualifies as advertising and nothing more. There is no way available for a developer using Intense Debate to test the connectivity of his site to the Intense Debate servers, no debugging procedures or accessible interface between the site and Intense Debate, no error reporting features, no logs–nothing!

Given that there are problems in both performance and maintenace of Intense Debate, it naturally makes sense that one would choose to uninstall it and use another plug-in in its place, as has been suggested above. But performance issues I have encountered make this solution more difficult than it looks at first glance. Simply put; comments that can be very valuable to persisting important discussion threads become lost, apparently on occasion Intense Debate prevents their retention within the local MySQL database. And this is not the result of a faulty WordPress installation either, because comments entered before the installation of Intense Debate have been retained.

Beyond the above, the problems Intense Debate creates for a WordPress site relate not only to the irregular and untimely–or even at times non-existent–display of comments, they also carry over into server CPU overload. While pages containing individual entries await the loading of Intense Debate comments that never arrive, the server’s CPU retains a reference to the page, eating up resources. For busy web sites this can become a huge problem that carries over into the inability of other page objects to load and/or function correctly, especially if client-side scripts are involved. Intense Debate is capable of making a site very user-unfriendly, which is one of the worst characteristics of any plug-in.

Given that the assistance WordPress has given to Intense Debate’s distribution links the two together intimately (even though WordPress and/or Intense Debate might try to deny it), I submit that it may be time for the WordPress community to face up to the widespread proliferation of web complaints relating to Intense Debate–just Google a few relevant keyword searches to see what I mean–and call into question how and why Intense Debate functions so as to get a transparent look at what it contributes to the profitability of its owners. Since the only economic benefit we can recognize from maintaining the resources necessary to support the plug-in are in the information it houses; Intense Debate obviously returns a profit from the information itself. It is a marketing and advertising resource that may be used in a variety of ways, I’m not going to speculate on what those are, but I think most of us can envision them.

So, in conclusion; it may be time for the WordPress community to come to grips with the reality of Intense Debate’s use and practices. We are dealing with a plug-in that does not deliver the functionality for which it is intended, which does not fulfill the support services promised, which is distributed for free by the enterprise whose interface it requires to expand its reach, and which damages the performance and inhibits the maintenance of web sites where it is installed–all for the purpose of amassing information used in advertising and marketing.

Am I the only one who thinks the preceding paragraph offers a definition of malware?

Jacob Sulzbach
Lafayette, Louisiana, U.S.A.