So I had planned on waiting to blog about this until it was all live, but, well, this is getting annoying. I’ve been looking into social commenting tools for a while now; Disqus and Intense Debate seem to be the two biggies at the moment. When I realized yesterday that Intense Debate had been purchased by Automattic (the folks behind Wordpress), I figured it was the way to go for my Wordpress blog. So I installed it and tried to get it up and running.

The signup and install are easy enough – create an account on intensedebate.com, then install their Wordpress plugin and activate. At that point IntenseDebate is supposed to sync all my blog comments into their site, and then any further comments will automatically be saved both to my blog and to their site. (This is handy, because if I ever decide I want to get rid of them, I just deactivate the plugin, and all my comments are still in place on my blog.)

The sad part is this: I activated the plugin yesterday about 1300. They warned it might take a few hours to complete the import, and assured me that I would get an email when it was done. In the mean time their plugin is active on my blog, so any new comments are run through the IntenseDebate system and show up fine, but all the previously-posted comments are MIA until they get done importing. It’s now almost 0800, and the status page still says “Queued, waiting for import.”

I’m not sure what course to take at this point. I’ve posted a couple complainy replies on Twitter to @intensedebate, but have heard nothing back. (Not that I expect they must reply, but… well, that’s another post.) I’ll give it a full 24 hours to try to import, after that I’m calling it a big pile of FAIL and deactivating. Maybe I’ll give Disqus a try then after all.