New Commenting system by Intense Debate

While we love TypePad and Six Apart, and we try to be good TypePad homers, unfortunately the recently-launched TypePad Connect commenting system has given a number of our readers problems with commenting and discouraged participation, and even we observed problems while trying to reply to comments.

So we have now decided to move to a more stable commenting system, Intense Debate, which we have been trying out at the Camera Deals blog. You can also see how it works on other blogs, such as Serious Compacts.

New Commenting system is active on new blog posts, starting with this one
This commenting system will be effective on new blog posts, starting with this one. For the moment, older blog posts (ones posted before this post) will continue to have the standard TypePad commenting system. Eventually we may attempt to import them to ID, but that's a future project.

Benefits of Intense Debate
Please feel free to use this post to post sample test comments. Some of the new features we get with this system:

+ You can vote up or down individual comments you like/dislike

+ You can report comments that are offensive or spam

+ for RSS readers, now there is a comment link and comment count under each post in our RSS feed

+ If you decide to create an Intense Debate account, you can use it on thousands of other blogs that have it

+ You can edit your comments within 15 minutes of posting time

+ New Widgets will automatically show most-commented posts and most-frequently commenting readers

+ Comments are stored in your Intense Debate account regardless of this blog's status

+ You can put your websites, galleries, blogs, social media, and other accounts in your Intense Debate profile so people can see your photography work, business or blogs

+ and more

Etc
You don't have to sign up for an Intense Debate account if you want to comment, although you can obviously get more benefits from this system if you do. You can also comment with an OpenID or without signing up at all.

Depending on if (or how much) spam leaks through, we may from time to time have to turn on moderation or use other anti-spam features. Hopefully we won't have to do that.

If you have any feedback, please feel free to use the new comment system below, or send us a direct email/message.

Please note that we continue our standard approach to commenting, and comments that are promoting spam, splogs, scrapers, MFAs, and such will be deleted even if the comments are on-topic.

Known Problems
1. Opera browser: Comments posted by users who are posting comments without an account and include a url in their comment profile, seem to have some formatting problems when reading them in Opera. They are readable, but the formatting is confusing

How it looks
Here is how it looks, the full page downsized to 500-pixels wide to fit the blog-page on 1024-wide screens: