Intense-Debate – Uninstalling, changing back author URLs and WordPress alternatives

A while ago I was experimenting with a relatively new comments trend in some of the WordPress blogosphere to manage and display your blog comments through 3rd parties. After looking into the options, I decided to go for Intense Debate. The main benefits considered to install such a tool were to have instant AJAX based multi-threaded commenting.

After running it for a month I decided to uninstall. The reasons for that included the following :

1. Horrible SPAM management and comment moderation. There were still some issues in regards to how Intense Debate plays with the WordPress mechanism, and some comments just got lost.
2. Sync problems between WP and Intense. Some comments were published in WordPress but not in Intense Debate and vice versa. It seemed as though some would eventually sync somehow, but that would have been after a long delay and with no admin notification.
3. Admin comments URL link go to Intense Debate instead of to the blog. this one really bothered me alot, since it affected some of the other plugins that I was using, like "Top Commenters" which now saw me as just another user with an external URL. I wrote them about that and they claimed that they're considering adding that later on.
4. Disappearing comments. Sometimes comments would just disappear. I couldn't tell when and under what circumstances, they just did, and more than once. Needless to say just how frustrating that it.
5. Comment section not appearing in search engines. I've heard they've been working on that, but for some time Intense Debate had some SEO crawlability issues since it's using Javascript . The "noscript" tag that was used included only some if any of the comments and usually with some wrong parameters. Naturally, this also affects those browsing the web with Javascript turned off.

There are endless other posts out there with more reasons (example). Uninstalling Intense Debate is a breeze, I'll grant them that, but there things you might want to consider doing after that :

(1) Revert all admin comments back to your URL instead of Intense Debate. Open your PhpMyAdmin, select your WordPress DB, select "SQL" to run an SQL query and run your variation of the following :

UPDATE wp_comments SET comment_author_url=REPLACE(comment_author_url, 'http://intensedebate.com/people/myintensedebateusername', 'http://www.myblogurl.com');
 
UPDATE wp_comments SET user_id=1 WHERE comment_author_email='myemail@gmail.com';

(2) Remove all Intense Debate sidebar widgets

(3) Upgrade your theme to included threaded comments. If you're running WordPress 2.7 and above you can change your theme to have that functionality.

(4) Add AJAX. This next AJAX commenting plugin looks interesting and works for WordPress 2.7 (I'm not sure why the original homepage is dead).

(Photo from Asktheadmin.com)