Intense Debate has entered a public beta phase, and I'm installing it to support comments from this post going forward. It offers a lot, but at some cost.

The features include:

• threaded comments
• comment tracking
• RSS feeds for comment threads
• user profiles

Actually that last one is the cost -- to post a comment, you need a profile and you need to be logged in. Actually, I like that feature. If I could, I would have already enabled TypeKey. Logging in seems like a common courtesy, like introducing yourself. I know that right now, anonymous comments are allowed, but really, I didn't have a choice.

But I don't expect people to compromise their privacy. Don't give your real name and use a throwaway email account for validation purposes.

But why would I expect people to do this?

Intense Debate does some very nice things.

Spam is handled more intelligently. Unlike my current system, where one blacklist is shared by all mu.nu bloggers, I have my own moderation-required list and a separate blacklist. Under the current system, one of the mu.nu. bloggers can create a bad blacklist filter and kill the entire commenting system. It happens with alarming regularity. This blog went without comments for 36 hours before someone emailed me to let me know.

I watch the comments, and in many cases, there are discussions that go on for a half-dozen replies or more. Threaded comments allows for comments to be displayed in a logical manner, instead of merely a chronological manner.

RSS feeds are provided for each post's comment thread, allowing you to view the comments in a reader and track the discussion that way instead of loading the blog everytime.

More internal statistics for me on user participation.

Since the comment section is expanded from a Java call, search engine spiders won't see them, which means I don't have to be concerned with the SEO value of my content being diluted by comments, especially spam comments.

There is voting on comments, but I don't expect that this will be a big draw. But I could be wrong.

Comment tracking. Click on a user profile for a posted comment and see what comments this person has posted on this blog and any other blog using Intense Debate. That feature will become more interesting as more blogs adopt Intense Debate.

A bit of PHP code on my part means the old comment system will continue to work on all posts before this one.

So I'm eager to see the comment system in action. For now, I've not enabled comment moderation -- just create a profile and comment away. I expect a lot of folks won't like the change, but I think on balance even the naysayers will come to like the system. But there is only one way to know for sure...