I just switched the commenting system from Disqus to Intense Debate. Everything went smoothly, no comments were lost that I can tell. We did lose threading on existing comments, but that’s not a big deal to me – I go back and forth on whether or not I like threading anyway. New comments can be threaded, no problem.

Why switch, you may ask? That’s a good question, and one a Disqus representative asked me on Twitter when I tweeted that I was thinking about switching. Incidentally, any companies out there? Set up a Twitter account and have searches set up so you can respond to people talking about/complaining about/praising your company. It’s really cool to have someone from Disqus or UPS or Comcast reply to your random tweets and answer your questions right there. But I digress.

I wasn’t unhappy with Disqus, but as an early adopter, I wanted to test out the competition. Plus, Intense Debate is owned by Automattic now (WordPress’s parent company), and I wanted to check out the integration. Plus, and perhaps most importantly, Intense Debate offers the ability to subscribe to comments via email, whether or not you’ve commented on the thread. Disqus says they’re working on that, but don’t have it yet, and while I honestly prefer to subscribe to comments via RSS, I’ve been talking to people, and subscribing via email is a coveted feature.

So there you go. Sorry to anyone who signed up with Disqus and is now exasperated about having something else to sign up for. I’ll reassure you in two ways. One, you don’t have to sign up with Intense Debate to leave a comment. Two, Intense Debate has probably THE EASIEST signup I’ve ever seen in my life. The first time I commented on an Intense Debate-enabled site, I was seriously impressed at how painless they made it, and I was like, hmmmm…these guys are onto something, maybe I should try them out. So there you go. Let me know if you all hate it.

I replaced the normal WordPress comment system with comments powered by Disqus. Disqus is a centralized comment management service that keeps track of all the comments you make on Disqus-enabled blogs – basically providing you an identity that follows you to different sites, making it easy for you to comment and keep up with the threads you’ve contributed to. It also allows threaded comments (I can never decide whether I prefer threaded or non-threaded comments; right now I’m on a threaded kick), video comments powered by Seesmic, and comment voting, which isn’t necessarily a huge thing with as small a blog as I have, but hey. Disqus is also the comment system of choice for Tumblr, which doesn’t have native comment support, and I’ve had it enabled on my Tumblr since I found that out.

If you don’t comment on a lot of different blogs (particularly tech/early adopter ones, which is where Disqus is the most popular so far), don’t worry, you won’t have to sign up for an account on Disqus if you don’t want to. You can continue to just put in your name and e-mail address (and website, optionally) if you want. If you want to sign up for Disqus, just click “verify my comment” when you comment the first time, and it’ll give you the option to log in or sign up. The next time you comment here or on another Disqus-enabled blog, it will remember who you are. The Disqus comments will only replace the comments on new posts and on older ones that didn’t have any comments already; comments that you’ve made here in the past will remain.

We’ll see how it goes; I’ve waffled back and forth on whether I wanted to do this, and I may go back eventually after all. A lot of negative feedback on Disqus has centered on how it removes a certain amount of control from the blogger (I can accept or reject Disqus comments, but I can’t edit them, as I could edit WordPress comments – I never actually did that, though), and also doesn’t support trackbacks when other people link here from their blogs. I do sort of hope Disqus comes up with a solution for the trackback issue, but as far as comment control, the debate seems to center on whether the blog owner or the commenter “owns” the comments and the content in the comments. And I’m feeling very democratic lately, and I think the commenter should own their comments. Moving to Disqus shifts control to the commenter rather than the blog owner. So there you go.

Oh, the other thing I changed was just to put three Twitter entries in the sidebar in text rather than the Twitter widget. It’s just cleaner that way.