New comment system for Hot Topic

It’s Saturday afternoon, and between finishing the chilli jam to go with tonight’s six-hour roast lamb and a quick pre-dinner bike ride, I’m moving Hot Topic over to use the Intense Debate comment system. This is an externally-hosted comment service, operated by Automattic, the WordPress people. During the import process, existing comments may not appear on the site, but all should be well within a few hours. This is only a trial, and I can revert to the basic WordPress comment system at any time (it runs in parallel, in fact), but Intense Debate offers a wide range of features that should make commenting (and managing comments, from my point of view) easier. Existing log-ins should synchronise with Intense Debate, but if you create an Intense Debate account you can have personal profiles and other things. The experiment has begun…

[Update Sunday evening] It appears that existing Hot Topic log-ins are not automatically recognised by Intense Debate. I recommend that regular commenters sign up for an ID account. That gives you access to “reply by email”, which is a neat feature of the system. You can also comment as a guest, but without that (and other) features.]