Windows to Russia: New Comment System! (IntenseDebate)

Hello,

Today on Windows to Russia, I got totally fed up with fighting the Blogger comment system. I have lost hundreds of comments and have no spam control other than going through comments myself. I want a system that I can allow comments to be posted as they are done by the commenter. I like the system to allow the people to see their comment right after they post it.

Blogger had no filters to automatically cut out cussing and spam. Blogger does not have a very friendly comment system and I decided to change all that. Blogger comments sometimes took two or three tries to get them to post… (some of the problem may be that I have somewhere around 5000+ comments)

I have tracked comments for months and found that the biggest country for rude comments is the USA and followed by Russia. I have a huge following in South America, India, Japan and Middle America. I do not get spammed or slammed with messages of love by them.

The Akismet Spam Filter is in effect now. (Link) They say 83% of all comments are spam and they are correct at least on this blog. There are days that I have spent hours removing spam and comments with cussing. Many times I have had 25 comments and only keep 3. The influx of comments has caused me to sometimes not answer for two or three days. So I have at least 83% more time to answer real comments. 🙂

I also have embedded the comment system called IntenseDebate. (Link) This comment system I hope will solve some problems. I picked this system after a lot of research and I hope that I have picked the external system that helps more than hinder the blog.

The new system allows people to post You Tube Videos in comments. It allows people to start a poll. It allows many functions that you could only dream about in blogger.

What is IntenseDebate:

IntenseDebate provides many new features meant to inspire discussion and easily follow the conversation.

In order to better organize the discussion, we’ve implemented comment threading which allows users to directly reply to one another.

Users also have an identity that spans across all blogs powered by IntenseDebate. Along with this is a reputation value, based on the quantity and quality of the comments users make, meant to give an overview of a user’s commenting history. Quality is determined by the users through comment voting, which also serves to move the best comments to the top.

With all of our comment systems being interconnected, we make it easy to track users and their activities across all blogs using our system by providing email and rss notifications.

In short, IntenseDebate has completely transformed the commenting experience.

So lets see what happens and as always Svet and I at “Windows to Russia” thank you very much for the patronage and support given.

Kyle & Svet

comments always welcome.

PS:
IMPORTANT NOTE:
I want to make sure everyone understands that just because I’m using IntenseDebate, doesn’t mean you need an account to comment. It’s totally optional. If you aren’t interested, that’s cool, you can comment just as you did before the exact same way.