Edited to note that I discovered that in order to comment, one needs to sign up for Intense Debate. So — never mind. Plugin Deactivated….

So I’m trying out a new comment plugin– Intense Debate. It was recently aquired by Automatic — the folks that produce WordPress. I saw it on another blog and signed up to be notified when the general public could use it. I got my notice yesterday and installed it.

I didn’t like the way it looked — different from the regular comments so I deactivated it. Then I got an email from someone named Michael at Intense Debate who noticed I deactivated the plugin and wondered why. Despite feeling a little concerned about Big Brother, I replied that it didn’t look like the old comments, some gravatars were missing and I was concerned about the rating system.

Michael replied that the rating system is part of Intense Debate, but could be customized in the future. He wondered why the gravatars were messing up and asked me to reactivate Intense Debate and deactivate Gravatars. So, being the obedient troubleshooter that I am, I did. No difference — the monster gravatars are not showing up in the comments.

Anyway, I’m going to give these comments a few days to see how they work. Let me know in the comments if you like them or not.

And if you don’t like them, I’ll gladly disable them again. But not before I give everyone a thumbs up.