@Martin - I'm happy to help out and take a look at your settings to see what's up. Can you send me details at support@intensedebate.com?

Thanks for the feedback. We'll definitely keep a captcha plugin in mind, but at the moment we don't offer it. One of the reasons is that we don't think captcha is a long-term solution to spam, but more of a band-aid. We think it’s becoming less effective than ever because it’s cheap for spammers to pay people to fill out captchas all day long. Right now our focus is on content-based solutions, like Akismet, so that we can keep the barrier to participation as low as possible. We're currently working with our colleagues at Automattic to improve our Akismet integration.

But again, please drop me a line and I'll be happy to help.

@Jeffro - regarding disabling thumbs-down voting, our goal is to minimize voting bias and mob mentality that can kick-in when you see a comment in the red. Votes are one of the main factors for user reputation scores, and negative votes can have a major impact on their score, especially if they're brand new to IntenseDebate.

Commenters are also more likely to give the thumbs-down to users with negative rep scores, so it's even more difficult for them to climb out. We don't want them to feel defeated and stop commenting, especially if their crime is that they voiced an unpopular opinion on a political blog or news site (which is quite common). We wanted to give admins the option to avoid this.

On the other hand, there are some malicious comments (and commenters) that deserve the negative ratings, so we wanted to still give admins the option to offer the thumbs-down. I should have included this explanation in my post and I'll be updating it shortly. :P

Also as quick follow-up, you mentioned that you wonder if we'll create our own user roles/capabilities system. Ideally we'd like to keep it as simple as possible, but it's something we've been chatting about. I'd love your feedback - what other roles/capabilities do you think would be handy for managing comments?