New Comment System – Disqus

Zelda Dungeon is switching its comment system from IntenseDebate to Disqus. We have been debating this change intensively for a long time within our staff, and we finally came to the conclusion that Disqus will best serve our needs as a growing site and community. To find out more about why we changed and how you can get started on this new system, please hit the jump.

At the time of this posting, we are importing the comments, so comments will be appearing as we go through the import. This could take some time, so please be patient. The final step that I listed in this post should probably be done when the import is finished.

IntenseDebate is a great comment system and it has a lot of really great things that are going for it and we have been extremely happy with the things that it has provided us and our community, but we are ready to move along and switch to a more powerful comment system. One of the prevailing reasons for switching to Disqus is that it is constantly updated and new features are added all the time. When we were looking at keeping IntenseDebate, we noticed that they hadn’t really updated their core in months. That right there is a sign for us, as a growing and progressing site, to move forward with another comment system.

Disqus has the ability to integrate with multiple social networks with one account, so you can Tweet your comments, post them on Facebook, and do many other things. You can also post like you could with IntenseDebate with a Facebook account, a Twitter account, and several other things. However, some down sides to switching are that there will no longer be a thumbs up and thumbs down feature, but you can still like comments as well to show your appreciation for them. Another downside is that those of you that have IntenseDebate accounts will need to create new accounts with Disqus.

To help ease the transition to Disqus for you, our fans, I have made a very straight forward tutorial in this post to show you how to make a new account and link all of your old comments to the new system. The instructions are below.

1. Start creating a new comment.
Type your comment in the “post new comment” box. After that, click the “Post as…” button to be taken to a login screen.

2. Click the corresponding pane to chose what account to post as.
Since I’m showing you how to make a comment with a new Disqus account, click on the “Disqus” option. The default selection is the “Guest” option. From here, you can also post from several other different services during this step as well. If you aren’t creating a new Disqus account, you can either stop here or skip down to the merging section of this post.

3. Create your new Disqus account.
Enter your valid email address (it is important that you use the same one that you used for all of your guest comments and your IntenseDebate comments), your username, and a password. Once this happens, be sure to verify your email address so that you can do the next step and be fully registered. From there, you will be able to link your different social accounts and flesh out your profile completely. Once the account is registered, the comment will be posted and go through, even before you fill out your profile.

4. Link your existing comments with Disqus
If you used the same email, like I said to in the previous step, you will be able to link all of your existing comments here on Zelda Dungeon to your new Disqus account. To do so, head to your Edit Profile page, and then find Merging. From there, it will detect all of your posts as a guest. When we imported all of the new comments, it just made them all guest comments. When you choose to import those comments, all of them will be linked here on Zelda Dungeon, and you can view them all as your own.

I hope that you enjoy the new system and that my directions were clear enough. If you have any problems be sure to let us know in the comments or shoot us a message at our Contact Page. Thanks guys!