Category: Technology Author : Duncan Riley Posted: December 7, 2008
Tags : disqus, Intense Debate, sezwho
There’s nothing worse as a blog owner to discover that your site isn’t loading properly. Saturday night at 10pm my time (3am PST Saturday) just before I was going to switch off for the night, The Inquisitr started doing funny things, like not loading the front page. I fired up Firebug to troubleshoot, and quickly discovered the issue was one of the Disqus widgets we had in the sidebar.
Disqus has experienced some downtime this year. Bloggers using a local install of WordPress and running the API plugin don’t have much to fear: comments revert to native WordPress comments when Disqus is down. Someone asked me this week if we’d dumped Disqus because one recent post wasn’t showing Disqus, so they were down at some stage earlier in the week as well. But that’s great if you’re only using Disqus for commenting: if you’re running widgets from Disqus there’s no fall back; if they don’t load, they stop everything past that point, as they did with The Inquisitr Saturday. The answer of course is to not run Disqus widgets, but we’ll get to that in a second.
Whether it was Disqus alone with issues I’m not sure. Ripping out the Disqus widgets caused more of the site to load, and then Outbrain was slowing things down a lot, so both may share a data center. I checked the one site I knew was running both: LouisGray.com and it was having the same issues. Our Technorati Engage 125px units also started throwing errors, so they’re still down today, along with FriendFeed integration.
I pinged Louis and his wise advice was that sometimes sites have outages, and it was the middle of then night so it wasn’t an issue for him. He’s right about it happening, but I don’t have to like it. For a 2 hour period we had only 200 visitors when we’d usually have 2000-4000, so it hurt.
In my anger I started shopping around for a Disqus alternative. SezWho and Intense Debate were the two sites I hit (JS-Kit is another service), and I decided to play with Intense Debate; it’s a small thing but Intense Debate offers far more information on their service than SezWho does, and it was the selling point.
I briefly ran Intense Debate here on The Inquisitr before switching Disqus back on once the issues had passed. Disqus is still running as I write this post, but I won’t commit long term to keeping it this way. Here’s why I nearly switched, and why I might yet.
Intense Debate For
Integrated WordPress commenting: no iFrame for Intense Debate, instead all comments are shown natively in WordPress. It’s an “advanced” view that delivers Intense Debate services in the one spot. Disqus by comparison has a highly confused interface: for example you don’t have all moderation features in their admin view, but you do on the post itself. In WordPress you get an iFrame.
Integrated FriendFeed comments: if I switch this will be a big selling point. Intense Debate imports FriendFeed comments into the comment thread itself, so they just look like standard comments. We’ve previously been running them here at The Inquisitr, but they aren’t combined in the comment thread. Disqus has previously talked about doing this, but they don’t do it today that I’m aware of.
Integrated Twitter support: not a huge selling point, but at a time where Twitter has never been more popular, the option to allow users to Tweet their comment complete with link can only help drive traffic back to your site. Disqus doesn’t offer anything similar.
Reputation Management: Both offer reputation management, but with Intense Debate it’s a stronger part of the presentation.
Disqus for
Better looks on site: You can customize CSS with Intense Debate embeds, but out of the box I prefer Disqus for looks. Intense Debate was more imposing on the page, from aggresive feature boxes through to a big “powered by Intense Debate” line at the base of the comments.
Bugs: One of the reasons I didn’t stick with Intense Debate was bugs; I’d swapped out Disqus due to server issues on their end, but the Intense Debate code caused local issues with their plugin and code base. I jumped on their support forums and others had reported issues as well. Better still, at the time of writing Intense Debate doesn’t support WordPress 2.7, which is all the more bizarre when you consider it’s owned by Automattic, the company behind WordPress itself.
Community: The biggest reason I’m sticking with Disqus for the time being. I’m sure Intense Debate has a reasonable community, but I know among our regular readers that many have Disqus accounts. I also know many others sites we link to and share with run Disqus as well. Community is THE KEY selling point to Disqus, it was one of the reasons I cited when we signed up, it’s a key reason why using Disqus has driven comment growth here, and dumping Disqus risks the inverse effect of costing us commenters, and it’s a gamble I’d rather not make, at least now.
Better Widgets: when they work, Disqus widgets integrate better on blogs, and I use two of them for that very reason. The widgets for Intense Debate felt clunky, didn’t integrate well, and needed hacking for better looks. Lazy perhaps, but Disqus is better out of the box.
Underdog: I like supporting Disqus because they are a small, independent startup, and it helps that CEO Daniel Ha is a great bloke who can’t do enough to help you when you get stuck (well accept in the middle of the night naturally 
). Intense Debate is an Automattic service, a big company with a near monopoly on self hosted blogs. Competition is best encouraged by supporting (within reason) the little guy.
Conclusion
As much as I’ll never get my lost sleep back from Saturday night (the light went out at 3am) my annoyance with Disqus gave me the opportunity to seriously look at Intense Debate, and I’m grateful that I did. It’s an impressive service, with many strong selling points. Competition in the market drives players to continually improve their service and features, and Disqus can easily improve in a number of areas based on what Intense Debate is doing. Disqus has my business for now, but that business could be snatched away in the future should a competitor be able to mount a strong enough reason to switch.
If you’re starting a new blog, or haven’t joined the commenting 2.0 revolution, you should have Intense Debate on your list. The switching path is easier than Disqus, and you could do far worse.
![[VIDEO] Confirmed: Mario Kart would suck as a board game](http://www.inquisitr.com/wp-content/2010/07/mario-kart-the-board-game-no-thanks-100x100.jpg)
Dec 7, 2008
Of course we all appreciate the constant support over here, but I hope you're not sticking with Disqus just because we're small (and nice people)
.
If the competing product offers something that we won't or can't, I would agree that it just doesn't make sense to continue supporting us — use something that works and will make you happy. Fortunately, we're aware of these and many of our other shortcomings and we have plenty of new announcements to make soon.
Thanks as always, Duncan!
Dec 7, 2008
Daniel, one part of the puzzle alone, but it is a part that helps
Dec 7, 2008
hey Duncan – we will run some analytics on this to investigate any load issues associated with outbrain and any shared resources with Disqus that may have had a compound effect here. Thanks for pointing this situation out. We will be back with you shortly.
Dec 8, 2008
Thanks for the comparison! It's good to see Disqus measured up against other solutions. I'm sticking with Disqus for the time being too.
Dec 8, 2008
The sole reason I switched to disqus was the community – it drives more visits and more interaction than intense debate did. The feature set of ID right now is definitely better though.
Dec 8, 2008
I've been here since day #1 and the fact that you used Outbrain and then (later, I think) Disqus helped convince me to stay. Perhaps this is all part of 'blog first impressions'. Am I going to add you to Google Reader or not – community widgets like Outbrain and Disqus help tip the balance of that decision in your favour.
There's a slight irony here though. I first read this post in bed, on my iPhone via Google Reader. Neither Outbrain nor Disqus really do well on either mobile or RSS!
I use Outbrain and Disqus on my blogger.com account. My own WordPress blog is new and I'm simply going to wait until 2.7 and investigate the new threaded comment options before making a call on the commenting. If Intense Debate lets me make the most of Gravatars while being Disqus-like then it will be worthy of a look.
Dec 8, 2008
Duncan, are you running the latest version of the Disqus WordPress plugin (version 2.03-3166)? The Disqus comments I display on my pages are rendered by my blog and not by an iFrame hosted on Disqus. I noticed that Louis also appears to be running an older version rendered by iFrames.
Dec 8, 2008
I should have said were you running the latest version. It looks like you are now, because the comments here are not being displayed in an iFrame. It does seem like Louis is still using an older version though, because his are displayed via JavaScript/iFrame.
Dec 11, 2008
I've been using Intense Debate for about a week now and I love it. I've had no problems with it and I love the fact that if someone comments on my blog on Friendfeed it sends that comment to the post itself.
Dec 11, 2008
Seesmic video reply from Disqus.
Dec 28, 2008
Hi guess…
Jan 9, 2009
I looked over Disques… ended up trying IntenseDebate. They now have CSS abilities as well. I am concerned about any possible down time though…
Jan 12, 2009
Well, I've kind of reached the same conclusion but based on a predefined criteria set and by considering 4 services: Disqus, IntenseDebate, JS-Kit and SezWho. You can read the details and (my) winners here http://themindstorms.wordpress.com/2009/01/11/c…
./alex
Jan 27, 2009
Well, I'm glad you stuck with Disqus.. it's an amazing system.
Jan 30, 2009
nice article! nice site. you're in my rss feed now
keep it up
Feb 2, 2009
Great article. I've just switched to Disqus, although I wanted to say your friend expressing no concern at outages in the 'middle of the night' is operating under a rather old-fashioned assumption of having only a relatively local readership and not a global one. If a site only has local appeal, really, all well and good–but then, even local village newspapers can have their stories read across the globe if interesting beyond the confines of their population. There is, simply put, no such thing as 'middle of the night' where a website is concerned. Never has been. I'm in the UK, my site deals with a lot of UK-specific stuff (not exclusively) and it has a majority readership outside the UK, often in time zones where they're sleeping while I'm up and about, and vice versa.
Feb 9, 2009
its more easy to debate when use disqus.
Feb 9, 2009
great article!, grats for u site
Feb 16, 2009
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Feb 19, 2009
Nice article, I like your topic and your taught, they are all realistic.. site isn’t loading properly is the number one problem today.
Mar 9, 2009
First question, why? Why use any of them? How do they result in more traffic, readers, or comments?
Which is better for SEO? I've heard concerns that the comments live in THEIR database not yours and/or that javascript is in place which can't be indexed. SezWho seems the better option in this regard.
Thanks
Apr 2, 2009
I've been using CoComment to track comments on my WordPress blog but haven't been that impressed with it's integration…it's a little rough around the edges. Thanks for the heads-up on Disqus, I'll give it a go!
Apr 5, 2009
What are you doing now that Disqus has closed down? At least, i read it was closing down on 1 April, recommending ppl to switch over the JT-Kit.
I'm looking for something with FrendFeed and Twitter support and may try IntenseDebate.
I once had Disqus on my blog, but ditched it after some of my readers complained that they did not understand the comment box options.
Apr 22, 2009
The fact that Disqus has a great follow-up feature makes it easier to start good conversation on your blog posts.
Apr 23, 2009
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Apr 23, 2009
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Apr 30, 2009
5 star rating! Thanks for reviewing these two systems. I'm not using either yet but I only knew about Disqus before. Now i can see a clearer picture.
Oct 16, 2009
So I went ahead and installed Intense Debate.
Twenty four hours later I′m using Disqus, and I′m happy with it.
Here′s the thing…Intense Debate would not allow me to edit comments, nor could I edit my replies after they were submitted. That, folks, was a show stopper for me.
Mar 14, 2010
you are not using intensedebate or disqus! i guess you are usinh jskit
Mar 22, 2010
js-kit is my least favorite, but disqus does seem buggy. When a service doesn’t work, and you’re working on a site, it matters because you don’t know if it is your fault. I just spent nearly an hour confirming it is disqus’ fault (at this brief moment).
But js-kit? You must be made of money
Apr 7, 2010
thanks for the post
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Apr 19, 2010
Nice read!
May 25, 2010
I just read this because I’m looking to see which of the two to use, but then, I come to the comments section and see you’re using Echo!!! man, I gotta see where this is coming from…
Nov 9, 2010
Great article, Thanks!
Jul 9, 2011
But now your using Facebook for commenting.
Jul 23, 2011
nice!
Dec 3, 2011
Now I am going to swich to intensedebat……….