Poll: Do you like the new commenting system?

I’ve been fiddling around with my comments section lately. The wordpress comments system is great, but I wanted my readers to have a better experience. Here are some things that made me unahappy with the native wordpress comment systems:

1. Page needs to be reloaded when you submit a comment
2. Can’t vote up or vote down comments
3. Can’t reply to comments via Email

The first one is the most important by far. I’d like users to have an immediate feedback that their comments have been posted. I tried several Ajax plugins to achieve this but none of them worked properly. So I decided to implement a third party commenting system. There were two and I tried them one by one – Disqus and IntenseDebate. As of this date, I’m using IntenseDebate for the reason given below, but I’d like your feedback on which commenting system you like or if you’re totally happy with the native wordpress comments.

Problems with Disqus Comments

A lot of the things that are important to others are not important to me. For me, Disqus was great because it allowed the comments and replies to be posted immediately without a page refresh – very useful for slow Internet connections.

The problem with Disqus was that people who post as guests don’t see the “Name” “Email” and “URL” fields easily – and it requires a separate click to enter the URL. I realized this when I saw Sraboney’s comment on my Climate Change post without her usual “URL”.

I didn’t want to have potential commenters drop out because of this so I chose IntenseDebate instead which shows all three fields clearly. That’s what you will see below this post. I really need some feedback on which one you guys like. So here are two screenshots – you choose which one you’d feel more comfortable using:

Disqus Screenshot:

IntenseDebate Screenshot:

Any more feedback would be welcome in the comments.

[poll id=”21″]

Along with your answer, do let me know your reasons for any of the three answers…