Four Island

Ok. As I mentioned in my yearly goals, few people comment on my site. I've asked around and a big reason is that they don't like commenting anonymously (Timbo94). That is why blogs such as Color Pencils and Dream Weaver get comments and I don't (along with the fact that their content is good), because they use IntenseDebate so their accounts are centralized.

Hoping to please my readers, I decided to try to implement IntenseDebate on my development computer. At first, it went pretty well. I replaced the comments on all commentable pages with the IntenseDebate JavaScript. It looked great and seemed to work.

However, it all went downhill from there. First of all, the main index page shows the number of comments next to each post. I was able to emulate that nicely by hacking some of the special JavaScript included in the Wordpress IntenseDebate plugin. However, while the post at the top of the page said "No Comment" happily, the rest all said "undefined" and the link didn't even point to the right place. Strange.

More importantly, there's the topic of my sidebar widgets. Since I would no longer be in control of the data, I couldn't access it freely. IntenseDebate does provide "Top Commentors" and "Recent Comments" widgets, but there's a catch. First of all, it's more JavaScript. You have to use the HTML it provides, no changey. There is limited CSS customization support, but it didn't help. The widgets looked terrible in my sidebar. Second, Recent Comments showed an excerpt from each comment. That's way too long. Mine only shows the post title, the author and a link. Third, the "Popular Posts" widget would still have to die because part of the fourmula for popularity is the number of comments on the post, which is unaccessible to me due to IntenseDebate.

Lastly, switching to IntenseDebate would involve me losing all comments already posted on Four Island as there is no easy way to import the comments. And we can't have that, right? :)

Because of all of this, I've decided not to go with IntenseDebate. It'd be too much trouble and it'd probably hurt Four Island rather than help it. So, I think I'll try to spruce up my own commenting system. So, I have some questions I'd like to ask you people (please comment, a few anonymous comments won't hurt and you're contributions will help remove the anonymous problem):

1. For the anonymous problem: I can't use the IntenseDebate accounts, but how about OpenID? Is that a plausible direction to go in?
2. Or would it be better for me to simply make it a lot easier to register? No, that probably wouldn't help. Sorry, disregard that suggestion.
3. Ok, perhaps I'm completely lost on the whole "anonymous" problem. Please leave suggestions, thankses!
4. Should I add comment threading like IntenseDebate does? I'm leaning towards the "no" end of the spectrum, but it's up to my readers. Sortof.
5. Any other IntenseDebate features you'd like to see in Four Island?

Anyway, thanks in advance for helping. I'm just trying to make Four Island a better, more social place. :)