Intense Debate's Commenting System Out Of Beta And Very Open

intensedebatelogo.pngThe battle over blog comments is heating up even more with TechStar’s Intense Debate coming out of beta along with Disqus today.

While we covered the service’s private beta previously, stepping out of beta is more than just opening up their sign ups. They’re opening up their entire commenting system as well.

intensedebate_small.pngThe new version will feature several enhancements to help publishers feel less squeamish about getting locked into someone else’s comment system. The system comes with full OpenID support, comment migration, and full feeds of your comments. This means Intense Debate won’t control your user’s log-ins. Publishers can migrate all their blogs comments onto Intense Debate and back to their blog’s original system without losing any of their comments. Finally, full XML support makes it easy to grab all your comments on demand.

The upgrade still includes Intense Debate’s original comment enhancements including threaded comments, spam control, a reputation system, rich user profiles, and ability to track user’s comments across all Intense Debate enabled blogs. It features some cosmetic enhancements, such as a comment skin that automatically matches your blogs color scheme and the option for users to expand or contract comments on a blogs main page, instead of clicking through to a dedicated page. All together, it’s a much richer offering than SezWho, which focuses mainly on maintaining user reputation and not syndication and networking.

Disqus and Intense Debate offer very similar commenting systems. The big difference is that Disqus incorporates a forum into the blog as well. However, Intense Debate’s user profile system seems further along than Disqus. It lets users see who visited their profile, link to other social networks, and a frequent commentor widgets. Both could benefit from inter-operating with each other. Which one is better for blogs is really a decision best left to individual blog owners.

You can try their comment system after the jump…

var idcomments_acct = “fa64964926b986792cf5ea46174f9fdc”;var idcomments_post_id = “1”;var idcomments_post_url;var idcomments_post_title;

var idcomments_acct = \\\’fa64964926b986792cf5ea46174f9fdc\\\’;var idcomments_post_id = \\\’1\\\’;var idcomments_post_url; var idcomments_post_title;