Why I Dropped IntenseDebate Comments from My Blog

Uncontrolled Flow of Spammers

Spammers most annoyed me when I was using IntenseDebate. We are well aware about the spam that how much it is dangerous for a blog or website’s health. A unique thing about the IntenseDebate derived spam was that most of it was the real visitors and the spam was not automated bots. So it was hard to fight against this. The primary intention of these real spammers was leaving links by knowing the fact that IntenseDebate is dofollow.

I made a script for makingIntenseDebate nofollow but it didn’t work perfectly, so I removed IntenseDebate. In some situations, even the strict moderation didn’t protect me against the spam links and some extremely advanced spammers hack entire IntenseDebate. While approving such comments, you will fail to notice that the comment has links and once you will publish it, a link will be posted. The worst thing about such comments is that you can’t even delete them once after publishing. 

How IntenseDebate Invites Spam

Almost all bloggers, website owners and SEO companies know that IntenseDebate gives dofollow links, so they target the blogs where IntenseDebate’s commenting system is used. They run special search queries in search engines to filter blogs using this commenting system and then spam them for getting dofollow backlinks. Not only the bloggers and website owners, SEO companies also use this for backlink building. 

IntenseDebate Don’t Synchronize Comments with Blogger

Although IntenseDebate is a brilliant third party comment management system for Blogger blogs but one of the worst things about it is that it doesn’t synchronize comments with Blogger and you can’t import these comments when you decide to switch back to Blogger’s comments. It doesn’t matter how good the reputation of any third party service is, still a risk of losing data is left there. So I decided to switch back to default comments of Blogger. 

Blogger Has Developed Better Comment Management

In recent past, Blogger introduced threaded comments which made the commenting on Blogger blogs more interactive. On April 19, Blogger integrated Google+ comments with Blogger comments and it added more features. So now Blogger’s inbuilt commenting system is good enough and after some quick upgrades, we can expect that Google will keep building the comment management on its blogging platform. In such a situation, it is better to stay with Blogger’s default commenting system despite of relying on third party commenting systems like Disqus, Intensedebate or Livefyre. 

The Last, Comment Approval Frustrated Me a Lot

The comment approval really frustrated me and it was a burden for me to visit IntenseDebate’s site again and again for comment moderation. It also compelled me to drop IntenseDebate comments from my blog. 

Conclusion:

I have dropped IntenseDebate but I am not asking you to do the same. If you are feeling comfort with IntenseDebate and are managing to fight against the huge flow of spam, then you can keep using it. But I shared what I experienced.