The keen-eyed among you, especially anyone leaving comments here, will have noticed over the past fortnight that the site comments have switched from Disqus to IntenseDebate before today switching back to Disqus again. The standard default WordPress in-built comments have appeared whenever neither of the other commenting systems have been running. So. Why?

A number of other bloggers have in the past written on the merits or otherwise of installing external commenting systems, and the pluses and minuses of Disqus and IntenseDebate. I’ve concluded both have serious failings but are more or less equal these days in terms of functionality and aesthetics.  All you can do if interested is try one for a week, try the other for a week, see what feels right for your blog and makes most sense to you in how it’s set up.

Any comments people leave while you’re test-driving are synched back into your WordPress database (and your old comments are imported into both Disqus and IntenseDebate), so you shouldn’t lose or corrupt any data at all by hopping around like this. Both systems perform well in my experience when it comes to import and export and maintaining a central integrity to your core WordPress comments.

I first tried IntenseDebate a long time ago and then switched to Disqus, which I stuck with a very long time and only got annoyed with and removed when it took over a week of waiting for an answer to my support message in the forums (along with, it seems, many more people judging by all the unanswered questions I spotted) and my email to the help address. I got auto-notifications from the help email address but nobody human ever contacted me as a consequence. That’s a very poor show.

If I hadn’t been a Twitter user posting messages about my frustration that contained the hashtag #disqus, which were spotted by a Disqus employee and then the CEO, I’d have had no responses at all. Eventually the CEO told me that the 403 error people were getting when posting comments here was a fault on my server, not theirs. He was truly apologetic for nobody having said this long before, but I was still none the wiser as to how I might solve the problem and only Disqus was giving me 403 grief. So I got rid of it and reported the issue with my webhost. My webhost, helpful as ever (is poor technical support to be found from every Internet company?), eventually replied with an email the tone of which suggested I was dim, having checked things out and finding no reason for the 403 error. But now it’s gone. Trust me, the 403 error was no figment of mine or my readers’ imaginations.

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