Yesterday I mentioned that the comments on this site were broken. For the most part, everything is back to normal using the standard WordPress comments, however all comments posted between October 14 and October 24 appear to have been permanently lost. Most unfortunately, many of these comments were in response to Usury: Three Questions, which was a conversation I very much wanted to continue.

After several unsuccessful attempts to do a “clean import” of the IntenseDebate comments, I decided to disable the plug-in, hoping that the problem might resolve itself. It didn’t.

Fortunately, this problem only impacted twelve comments in all. Curiously, these comments were not present in the database backup file that I created on Thursday, October 22—although I recall seeing and responding to these comments (as evidenced by the archive of my individual user comments.

I have not yet decided whether I will re-activate the IntenseDebate plug-in.  For the most part I have been satisfied with its performance, although I’ve noticed that sporadically after I “approve” a comment held for moderation, that same comment never appears on the site.

I am open to suggestions, if there are other plug-ins etc. that might enhance the comments here.