MacBros' Place

I’m kicking this plug-in to the curb. Intense Debate was just something I wanted to try out and after a week or so the clutter it managed to have me go through was not worth it one single bit.

What it did was take control of the WordPress comment system and that was one thing I didn’t like at all. But on the day I installed it, my traffic spiked to double I was normally getting. I had over 1200 unique visits on that night. Apparently it was just a fluke. Traffic has gone back to it’s original flow. Maybe something popped up on the search engines people were searching for on that night.

It was a nightmare trying to get rid of the spam comments that made it through both it’s filter system and Akismet’s filter. So it was terrible at filtering out the spam. Akismet alone did 100% better than it did on it’s own. I guess the easy comment submission form made it easy for the shitheads to spam. That alone is just cause enough for removing the plug-in.

Unfortunately, a few comments were lost. I know Teeni, made a couple that ended up in a parallel universe never to be seen again, but if anybody else did also, I’m sorry, I didn’t delete them on purpose. And I read your comments Teeni, just cant reply to them now because they’re gone. Go ahead and re-comment if ya want, that way you’ll keep your comment rank.

Another reason I didn’t like the plug-in is because it didn’t work in unison with the current Top Commenter and Recent Comments widgets on the sidebar, and if you wanted that feature on your side bar, you had to use their javascript widget that caused Google Chrome to either crash or freeze, plus it slowed down loading time.

Bottom line is that although it is a good concept in gaining readers and comments, it still needs a lot of work. The fact that it practically takes over the entire WordPress comment system is something that I don’t like at all, it is also the fact that it will not work with other comment widgets and forces you to use a very clunky javascript one they provide.

It’s not worth the 2+ hour installation.