For the sole fact that the IntenseDebate blog commenting system is now owned by Automattic, I installed their system and entrusted my readers’ comments to them. Now I regret having done so. I wish I’d opted for Disqus instead…
On one of my blogs, Davao Delicious, I’ve lost a few really cool comments that were posted by my readers after I’d installed IntenseDebate. After repeated attempts at notifying them about it, no luck at all. They did email me back, but with very unclear and untimely responses.
I’m really kicking myself in the butt right now. 
IntenseDebate’s system is apparently still very buggy, and leaves much to be desired. I can’t help but compare them with Disqus, which appears to be more stable and has more bells and whistles.
In IntenseDebate, comments and trackbacks are not segregated. When the blog owner — who might be maintaining more than one blog — is notified of new comments via email, the subject line does not have any marker at all to identify on which blog the comment was made. Comment management is not seamlessly integrated with WordPress (huwat??). And a few other petty stuff that, when added up, made having IntenseDebate installed on my blogs quite irritating.
The worst part of it is, if I remove IntenseDebate from my blogs now, I will lose all the precious comments made after this commenting system was installed. Sure, I can export an XML file of the comments… but I can’t very well manually re-add all those comments back to my blog posts!
What a mess!!
3:06 am on 8 Nov 2008
Good thing you only had to do it for a few comments. Try manually adding back comments on your more popular blog posts. I bet you'll be cursing like a sailor.
3:43 am on 8 Nov 2008
Just a few days before you migrated to intensedebate, I was researching a similar move, but I was thinking of going to disqus. I have a friend who went with disqus a month or so ago. He regrets the move now, and actually abandoned disqus already. Many similar complaints to what you mention with intensedebate.
For now, I have decided that I'm sticking with the standard comment system in WP, I think that it works well anyway. I have one blog with more than 24,000 comments on it, and I would hate to do anything to lose those comments, they are an integral part of the site, and very valuable IMHO.
4:52 am on 8 Nov 2008
IMO too, Bob! That's why I said I'm kicking myself in the butt… even up to now.
5:13 am on 8 Nov 2008
That's one of the reasons why I', still sticking around with my WordPress comment system instead of using one that's externally hosted
6:43 am on 8 Nov 2008
I see that the lost comments at DavaoDeli.com are back. Apparently, comments with ID are a now you see, now you don't affair.
8:31 am on 8 Nov 2008
No, Lyle, I added the comments back manually…
It's a good thing I don't delete notification emails — a lesson learned from a major mishap with my blogs before.
9:21 am on 8 Nov 2008
Another thing that I really don't like is the nested comment replies. I used to think it would be a great thing, but on that one blog that gets a huge number of comments, I tried a nested comments plug in about a year ago, and people loved it for about a week. A week later, though, they hated it, found that it was confusing, instead of eliminated confusion.
I just think that the standard WP comment system is the way to go, at least for now.
9:37 am on 8 Nov 2008
Hmmm… that's a thought. Will keep monitoring. Thanks Bob!
4:49 am on 9 Nov 2008
@Kevin — Yeah, better not switch yet. Maybe when they emerge out of invite-only mode, hopefully they'll be much improved…