You will notice that we’ve moved to a new comment system this morning. We actually activated this last night to see us through a very heavy traffic period.
As I’m currently away at a wedding this weekend, I’m unable to monitor the site and recover things should they go down. As a result we’ve introduced the Intense Debate system to hopefully give us greater stability while I’m away. This is only a temporary measure but is a better option than deactivating comments.
Many of you will be familiar with Intense Debate and will have accounts already. If you’re not and are scratching your head this morning then read on for details of how to get started…
In order to use the new system, all our visitors will need to register with its provider – IntenseDebate. The process if very simple and you can read up on their privacy policy here. Just to avoid confusion, IntenseDebate are now owned by Automatic which is the company behind WordPress, the platform on which this site is built.
One thing to stress – your existing/old username and password for this site is not valid whilst Intense Debate is active..
Signing up to IntenseDebate is very quick – you just need to select a Username, Password and supply a valid Email Address. One thing to note – you may not be able to use your registration details used on this site right now but don’t worry, you can change your display name to your familiar community name once you’ve registered. You can do this via your profile page in Intense Debate.
On the subject of gravatars, you can tell IntenseDebate to use your existing gravatar via your profile providing you’re using the same email address for both gravatar.com and your IntenseDebate account.
Once again, this system is only in place as a temporary measure. We know it has some issues with collapsing replies and refreshing. While we have reported these, it’s unlikely that these will be fixed anytime soon. We will therefore be moving back to the old WordPress system once I’m back monitoring the site following this weekend.