Some of you will have noticed that I rolled out Intense Debate as the commenting system on this blog. It replaced Disqus, another centralised commenting system, – mainly because it gave me the option to import and export comments with ease and seemed to give me more control over spam. It just felt more rounded. Disqus on the other hand definitely increased discussion on blogs – I browsed more blogs as a result of being on Disqus than I have in all the time I have been on Intense Debate. It is much too difficult to interact with others on Intense Debate.

Unfortunately we have hit a few snags. Straight after I installed Intense Debate, there was a noticable slowdown on my site when compared to Disqus. Thankfully they fixed it soon enough though Ive noticed it happening again. A sign of their gaining popularity I’m sure. But a much more serious issue is that Hrafn at Think Artificial emailed me saying he got a “Error! Connection has timed out” when trying to comment. I’ve messaged Intense Debate to get some feedback on it but I’m wondering whether I just go back to using my own blog’s commenting system.

It is the wordpress.com vs wordpress.org question – is it better to host your own or let someone else provide the service.

[update] Rather illustrating my point, Intense Debate is down at the time of posting this post. sighs.