Sunday 26 October 2008

Do not use Intense Debate!

34 comments
I want to get this blog going again, except I have a problem that stopped me blogging and now I want to start again, I still can't resolve. I installed Intense Debate and it never worked properly. I tried uninstalling it and my comment system stopped working. Clearly I must have missed something in the instructions and/or they were poor or inaccurate (personally I think it was one of the latter options).

Now I have started this all over again. I tried reinstalling IntenseDebate using the widget method. This did not work. Could not uninstall it since the widget was not visible to uninstall. Tried the template variation etc. I am wasting time and going around in loops on this. Clearly, somehow, my template has been corrupted by this process but the backed up template I have does not fix this problem (yes always backup when you do something like this). Since this work was done a few months ago it is unfortunately difficult to trace the right version plus the original machine I used for this is not longer available :-) I have spent many hours working on this template and do not want to waste time rebuilding it from scratch. Either I will have to waste time rebuilding my site from much older backups or fix my current template. Either way, an utter waste of time.

All I want is an inline commenting system and google now provides this. I have been a programmer for over twenty years, having written in around twenty different languages. If I am having such trouble with this, what is a noobie going to do? This is still not a mature solution to recommend to anyone - as nice as it is. In the meantime looks like I am going to have to waste more time till I can get the google comments working again :-( For everyone else, I humbly suggest that you please select the radio button for "embedded below post" in the Settings->Comments->"Comment form placement" section for customising your blog.

UPDATE:
I have given up on IntenseDebate. If you just want embedded comments read the bold above and read some of my comments in this post if you have trouble. If you want to install IntenseDebate that is up to you. I do think it is far superior to blogger comments even with embedded comments, but is not worth my time to play with anymore for now. If you read my comments you can see I am having enough trouble with blogger's feed gadget (and I have to add that new waste of time was partly generated by me installing IntenseDebate and changing the Recent Comments module - whatever :-( )

34 comments:

Martin Freedman said...

OK this is a test. Switching off embedded comments seems to get my comments working again. Now can I get embedded comments working?

Martin Freedman said...

ok popup comments work too. Maybe if I switch back to embedded comments it will start working?

Martin Freedman said...

ok there seems to be a conflict between draft.blogger.com and the normal www.blogger.com. Draft is now switched to popup which over-rode the normal dashboard.

Lets carry on, making this look that it is less to do with my template.

Martin Freedman said...

switched to full page post in normal - overridng the draft setting. Lets see if I can now switch to embedded.

Martin Freedman said...

According to this thread Searched for "embedded comments" it might be my customized template that is the problem. However before I switched to unsuccessfully to Intense Debate I had successfully got embedded comments working via draft.blogger.com hmmm.

Martin Freedman said...

Well at least I have my comments working again. Now my recent comments widget is not! Lets get that working and stop this for now.

Martin Freedman said...

Found a simple solution for "Recent Comments".

1. Used my exising comment feed "http://impartialism.blogspo.com/feeds/comment/summary"

2. Added the feed widget and renamed it "Recent Comments"

3. Selected author and date options - the default atom feed works better and cleaner the the alternate rss feed (suffix ?alt=rss on feed stated above)

So one way back where I started - still no embedded comments!! One last attempt to get that sorted.

Martin Freedman said...

Oh dear "Recent Posts" has stopped working too! Can use the same solution (I hope) as I just did with Recent Comments. Put my posts feed into a feed gadget. Testing now

Martin Freedman said...

OK got posts working and did the same for My Comments Elsewhere which is based on a delicious feed. These speed up the loading of my page but are limited to 5 entries in the blogger default widget. Still I like the speed improvement and am only worried at how often blogger rechecks the feeds rather than retrieves them from a server cache - we will see.

Getting way beyond my Intense Debate complaint I know.

Martin Freedman said...

Aha! Success! I followed this
"though if you’re using a heavily-customized Layouts template you may need to reset your widget templates before the embedded comment
form will appear." - from the blogger buzz on this feature. I now have embedded comments!

Note I did save my template first. The widgets defaults are only for the blogger widgets and they have not reverted back to their defaults, so I did not need to reset them! For example in the wdiget feeds I had changed the default presentation e.g. I added the non-default dates feature and this was not reverted! Anyhow it works and now I can move on to generating productive content :-)

Martin Freedman said...

OK the blogger feed widget is not updating the feeds regularly enough for me. Will need to find a third party one now

Anonymous said...

Um, instead of complaining, have you tried asking for help?

Its like you got lost and refuse to ask for directions, but yet still mad you are lost. LOL.

Martin Freedman said...

Hi Jimbo

Yes I did ask for help in the past and got no useful feedback (sorry db0). I also spent an hour searching when the problem recurred yesterday to no avail. An hour was enough time to waste on this.

Anyway now I am just trying to solve the failure for the blogger feed gadget to update - I have added a "?" at the end of the feed url. Lets see if it works.

Martin Freedman said...

No it did not :-( I have searched on this (nothing to do with IntenseDebates by this point) and there are many comments over the blogger feed gadget not updating and no solution. I did not think the "?" suffix would work and damn I was right :-(

Martin Freedman said...

I am using this post to do far more than play with IntenseDebate which I have given up on. I will update the post to that effect.

Martin Freedman said...

Testing

Martin Freedman said...

Well the feed gadget appears to be updating once an hour. I will leave this for now and revisit it later if it does not do this.

Anonymous said...

I'm sorry to hear you ran into issues with IntenseDebate. I apologize for the inconvenience. I can help troubleshoot these issues and get IntenseDebate up and running as it should be. Could you please email me with your template and we'll get this fixed?

Kind regards,
Michael
IntenseDebate

Martin Freedman said...

Thanks I have just sent you an email.

Martin Freedman said...

Well trying this with a supposedly fixed IntenseDebate template but nothing. Lets go to the intensedebate site and see what other settings to change

Martin Freedman said...

OK first the template file was 5 times as big and was spattered with ms-word additions and did not load into blogger - it complained about no skins.

I was finally able to open this up in ms-word without all these weird additions and copy/pasted this version - which looked far more like my old template into blogger.

There were no comments on the latest post

Checked everything on the ID site regarding reinstalling and there were no other settings to touch.

It did not work so have re-installed my old template.

ID is very nice with lots of features I want, it just does not work :-(

Martin Freedman said...

Resetting my widget template did lose some code in particular my Feedburner PRO stats javascript. Beware!

Anonymous said...

I feel the same way... I'm trying to uninstall it but don't have much luck :(

Martin Freedman said...

Consumed Consumer

Sorry to hear that. Try and contact them direct via email rather than that support system. They were very responsive to me even though I never got it working.

Anonymous said...

So far IntenseDebate is working quite well for me. I opted to use the javascript version though...

50 said...

I'm having problems uninstalling IntenseDebate from my Google Blog as well. Their technical support is not much support at all! I would recommend that other bloggers avoid IntenseDebate unless you enjoy being a guinea pig for beta software.

Rickin said...

I suggest you use lucia's link love or commentluv. Both works great :-)

Martin Freedman said...

Thanks Rickin. This led me to JS-Kit and since that syncs with blogger comments I will try that first.

faithlessgod said...

This is stupid it does not support blogger users on blogger or openid!

faithlessgod said...

and it has the dates srewed up!

faithlessgod said...

the dates are scrwed up only on this thread?
 
The wysiwyg looks poor 8-)  but easy enough to do <span style="font-weight: bold;">bold</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">italics</span> and <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><span style="text-decoration: underline;">underline. </span>Does Blooger native comments support underline? </span>
 
Comments links seem ot have gone? My Recent Comments still wors as this writes to Blogger's comment system.

faithlessgod said...

Makes my avatar too big, think I can fix that in the admin control panel. No preview - not really needed but not delete or edit function after comment is posted  :(

Debate Chat said...

I want to be uninstall my blog, but it is not worked. Thanks for your blog....

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