The May 9, 2011 change to IntenseDebate's comment linking

I posted this note to the company blog, and found that it had vanished a few minutes later, so I created this blog and reposted my remarks here, with one small change. IntenseDebate’s system forced me to post this in pieces. I’ll leave out the ellipses.

This comment is a little off-topic for the post, but it is about IntenseDebate, and since there’s nowhere else for me to post this …

A change in the IntenseDebate system went through a very short while ago. Instead of the links on the comments left on blogs using ID going to our profiles, they now take visitors to the first site we have listed on one’s profile. This is not even a choice for the user, I notice - this is how the links work, whether the user likes this or not. Yes, visitors can scroll over to a user’s profile photo and click on the link they want on the drop down menu - if they think of doing so - but most visitors won’t bother to play around with the page long enough to find this out, and there’s no reason why they should.

Some things become cliches for a reason. IntenseDebate fixed something that wasn’t broken, offered a solution in search of a problem, and created a problem by doing so. The link I found my visitors would have been shunted into was one I created for readers without IntenseDebate accounts who wanted to follow my comments on IntenseDebate, using the Feedburner system. It’s a nice, simple, functional page for those who expect to be there, but it’s an unwelcoming place for somebody to be dropped by surprise. I felt lucky to have been posting when the system was altered, so I could, at least, clean up part of the mess your staff left behind, immediately. Others will have similar surprises, as one should expect when one takes what others have hooked up, and shuffles it around without their knowledge.

Getting past today’s pointless innovation by the ID staff was simple enough, if a nuisance. I created a link from my IntenseDebate profile to itself, titling it so that nobody would click on the link and think that something was wrong with his connection, because the screen wasn’t moving. Since you don’t let us reorder our sites, I also got to do a lot of cut and pasting to move everything down a place, so that the link from the profile to itself would end up where it needed to be to do what it was there for - the first place, atop the listing of sites.

The world’s simplest hack, and it works. For now. Until you guys decide to change the system, instead, and who knows when that will be. Please, seriously, try to understand this - change for its own sake is not a good thing, despite everything that you might have heard to the contrary.

For a platform to be useful to the user, it needs to be stable, to be predictable. These might not be sexy words that make your job or product sound exciting, I know, but guess what? You’re working in IT, and the field isn’t ever going to be sexy or exciting. If you wanted sexy and exciting, you should have become a roadie or something when you had the chance. The most you can hope for, now, is to be helpful.

Go for it. It might not sound like much, but doing that would put you ahead of 95% of the industry.

As I wrote on Twitter, a short while ago

Maybe those comments were being screened, but they didn’t vanish before, so I’m a little skeptical about that possibility. No worries, though. As usual, I saved copies of my remarks, in anticipation of them being deleted. I’ll just repost my comments, elsewhere, to a side blog of my own which I’ll create for that sort of purpose.

and so I did, creating this blog just moments ago. I’ll install IntenseDebate on it, next.