By Many of you may have noticed that I installed the Intense Debate comment system today. I am trying this out to see if I.D. reduce the amount of bandwidth the ROK Drop uses while providing more comment features for the ROK Head community. My site uses huge amounts of bandwidth due to the number of comments the site receives, which costs money. By hosting the comments on Intense Debate I will be using their bandwidth to load the comments instead of from the server that I use to host this site.
I am also hoping that the Spam filtering technology used by I.D. will cause less comments to get lost in the spam que which is a frequent complaint that I receive.
Here are a few details about Intense Debate to help ease you into its use. First of all it offers ROK Heads the ability to vote up and down on comments, which in turn builds reputation points for commenters. I’m still playing with it, but apparently there is a way to create a list of the commenters with the highest reputation on the sidebar. I.D. also has a spell check and a comment edit function which is something that has been asked to be installed in the past by ROK Heads. Intense Debate even has Smileys that I installed just for Tom.
The CommentLuv feature is for people with their own blogs that want to promote their last blog posting at the end of their comment. I will monitor how this goes, but if it gets too spammy I will remove it. Finally on the sidebar you will see the recent comments widget. Do users like this one or do you prefer the old get recent comments widget? Also are ROK Heads interested in having the comment system compatible with Facebook to where you are automatically logged in with Facebook and are able to comment with your Facebook ID?
Speaking of Facebook, users may have noticed that I also installed a Facebook “Like button” that displays at the bottom of each posting. If you like a posting you read on the ROK Drop, please click the “Like button” and promote the posting on Facebook. Also remember, you can follow the ROK Drop on Facebook now as well. You can either “Like” the Fan Page I set up or follow me on my Profile Page:
I am still playing around with some of the features of Intense Debate, but feel free to let me know what you think in the comments section and any further recommendations you may have.
4:13 am on May 1st, 2011 1
Interesting.
4:29 am on May 1st, 2011 2
I miss having my "name" on automatic. Or is there a way and this is lack of experience on my part. This would be remedied if I "joined" correct? Intensedebate will not allow and states the "account" exist. So school me up please.
4:30 am on May 1st, 2011 3
I tied to post the following comment. It didn’t work. I am trying a work-around.
—–
As of now, it doesn’t seem as if the “recent comments” is working.
Once it is working, my suggestion for the format would be to have ONLY the final new comment on the last 5 to 8 posts that have been commented on.
When it posts all the most recent comments, a lively debate will edge all the other topics into obscurity.
5:23 am on May 1st, 2011 4
Ok.
I love the rating scheme.
I agree with CH on the show recent comments.
I like the reply feature, though it seems difficult to follow the thread as it is more convoluted than when it was presented in a linear fashion, especially for threads with 30 plus comments.
I understand your need to lower bandwidth.
Troubleshooting:
When I click the "headline" to go to a page, everything shows up and works fine.
When I click the "comments (#)" at the bottom of a post, the page loads (headers, footer, sidebar etc) but no content, neither the post nor the comments. I guess you could just remove the lower link for a quick fix. Although I've figured it out, i's hard to break the habit, Pavlov.
Recent comments are not showing
7:21 am on May 1st, 2011 5
Well I ended up turning Intense Debate off. I.D. is good in concept but it was just too buggy and not very user friendly.
It is not possible to turn off the reply system and add numbers like with the standard WordPress commenting system I have installed. I don’t like the nested comments either because it makes the various conversations going on hard to follow.
The disappearing posting when clicking the comments link as Leon described above I could not fix either. So I will have to look around and see what else is out there to use, but I.D.’s problems are surprising considering that it is owned by the same company that runs WordPress.
I appreciate everyone’s patience with this.
7:26 am on May 1st, 2011 6
1. Please never again try the failed experiment that was REPLY.
Good comments that need consideration and reply get lost deep in down in the comment stream. Groups of comments are harder to reference. Previous comments are harder to find and review. The linear stream of group thought is disrupted and lost… and the thinking and motivations for past posts become less clear.
The reply function works well for an open topic post where several conversations are going at once… but it is poor for keeping people on-topic when they have the disruptive ability to start little nested conversations that quickly diverge from the topic at hand.
2. Make the blog lists/topics on the right side expandable submenus by type. As it is, they needlessly take up pages and pages. The comment entry box should be the bottom item on every page… not one fifth of the way down with lots of blank screen under it.
Make it all one column and widen the posts to fill the free space so more can be seen on the screen at one time.
With only the headings showing, the right column might look too empty… you can make the ads a little bigger to support your advertisers… and put a box around them or something. For a while, I thought it was Phrawg’s English Class.
3. Allow the search engine to search the comments as well. It would be nice to easily fine what a poster’s previous comments on a subject were by typing in their name and a keyword or two. I have a work-around but it would be nicer if the search box here did it.
4. Screw Facebook. I set up test accounts to see just what they did with my info. Stuff that was supposed to be private was not. They sold that shyt faster than Songtan Sally sells short-time to a drunk airman who lost his glasses. Anybody who values privacy, which should be anyone involved with the military… especially if they post less-than-flattering stuff about anybody who might get sensitive… should avoid Facebook. Your paranoia can run from getting pestered with advertising to a marketing company set up as a terrorist shell to mine relationships and trends in the American military… or imagine getting captured by terrorists/insurgents/Taliban/enemy du jour and, from your Facebook list, they know who to threaten if you don’t talk. Screw Facebook.
8:33 am on May 1st, 2011 7
ChickenHead ~ staying off Facebook isn’t necessarily the answer to protecting your personal and professional information. The bad guys have discovered a neat little trick: find a guy in a sensitive position who doesn’t have an FB page, create a page for him, and pretend you are him. In no time, they are chatting with your friends and colleagues…finding out all sorts of interesting things.
9:15 am on May 1st, 2011 8
And I got my laugh back.
Now I can use it to annoy you guys even more. 
9:45 am on May 1st, 2011 9
http://www.police.pref.fukuoka.jp/keiji/keiso/caution.html
Where are the Yakuza getting these grenades from? China? N/S Korea? Combination? JSDF?
10:40 am on May 1st, 2011 10
guitard,
That is why my tinfoil hat is made of molybdenum.
I have a program that does a Internet/Undernet search for me once a month or so. Nothing shady pops up but people still post stories about what fun they had in the bar 10 years ago. They are fun to read and I sometimes drop a comment to say hello.
Privacy is no longer a valued commodity… which is unfortunate… because, paradoxically, privacy is an important aspect to capitalism even though it also relies on the free exchange of information.
When there is no privacy, competitors can gather enough small pieces to build the total picture… from supply lines to hiring trends, etc.
In daily life, a lack of privacy allows organizations with resources, computational to financial, to maximize their interests over those of the masses. Some of that can translate to better services… most translates to a maximization of influence, control, and profit.
Of course, companies, governments, and the ruling elite, guard their privacy like treasure. That should not go unnoticed by the masses… but it does… as they are attracted to noisy, flashy, crap from Facebook to smartphones.
I think a degree of privacy is important as a population as much as an individual. I do my best to maximize it and I encourage others to do so as well.
kangaji,
Interesting link.
The first one is American and is kind of old timey… not made since the 60s. The last one looks like smoke. I don’t know the rules about those but a Korean general gave me a couple of them and I attached them to my leg with a bracket while I was paragliding to show off.
Many years ago in a third world country, I bought a sack of grenades from a military officer for 20USD each. They were brand spanking new with a little plastic cap and separate screw-in fuses. I was scared to death of them and practiced throwing about-the-same-weight rocks a couple of times before daring to throw one of these.
Well, I went to a river way out in the bush and tossed them in. GREAT FUN! A big wet bang and a plume of muddy water shot about 5 stories into the air and rained down on everything. I threw one onto land over a ridge but was too chicken to watch it go off. It made a bang and there was smoke and dust when I popped my head up. The water was much more fun.
I suppose one could schmooze a way to buy them in a poor country and get them into Japan in a container of frozen shrimp or something.
It’s not something I’m too worried about… lots of ways to make bigger and better bombs… and not a lot of grenade attacks in developed countries.
If I were to guess, I’d say the police found a replica or training grenade that some collector had… that some Yakuza couldn’t resist paying a bunch of money for… that the police panicked over.
11:41 am on May 1st, 2011 11
Damn, I’m glad you were chicken/smart enough not to watch it go off.
No… these are not training grenades. Two yakuza who were 54 and 56 were riding in the car and it went off inside and burned up the car. They were pronounced dead at the hospital rather than on site. So, these guys were in
good enough condition to be extracted from a burning vehicle and taken to a hospital after the grenade went off INSIDE the car. Anyway, the police say/think that it went off by accident.
http://response.jp/article/2011/04/10/154628.html
Here’s an English source on another hand grenade find:
http://www.japantoday.com/category/crime/view/hand-grenade-found-in-home-of-yakuza-in-kanagawa
So, you’ve got more hand grenades with less experienced people in Fukuoka. The Grenade looks like it was modded and smuggled. The explosive power is such that even though it went off inside of a car, the two men could be extracted and taken to a hospital to die or be pronounced dead there despite the car burning up. Let’s see…
12:31 pm on May 1st, 2011 12
I don’t think I want to find out if a grenade with a yellow band on it is smoke or white phosphorus…