Recently created topics in Intense Debate

The Top Commenter widget displays the top 10 all time commenters for your blog. I would like to see the following additional options:

Show top 10 commenters for the current calendar month

Show top 10 commenters for the current calendar year

Show top 10 commenters for a specified duration in the past (ex: last 60 days, last 90 days, etc).

These options would be useful, for example, if you are running a top commenter competition and want to display only the top commenters for the duration of the competition rather than all time.

With the recent acquisition from a big player in the Free Software community, I think it would be beneficial for IDC to open its source code to the whole world.

Doing this would bring in some immediate benefits

• Very fast development progress. With the great bulk of developers around, including the wordpress community, you will very soon outpace and surpass your competitors in features and stability. Free Software has proven that it can from an underdog to alpha male many times. Wordpress itself is a testament to that


• Immediate goodwill from the community. People like me love it when code is liberated like that. If you proceed to do this and issue an announcement, you will blow everyone out of the water in popularity. You saw how much traffic a simple announcement from the wordpress.com blog brought you. What do you think being mentioned in the major FOSS hubs will do?

There are some objections that might be raised on this, that I thought I'd tackle.

First you might think that opening your code will allow your competitors too peak into your secrets and steal your code. Well, this is not possible. If you use the correct licence, that is AGPL3, then not only can your competitors not distribute your code without going open source themselves but they cannot even use it without opening up.
Yes, they may peak into your code to find ideas, but they will need to recode them in order to avoid infinging on copyright and agpl3.

Second, you might be thinking why it would be beneficial to allow anyone to locally serve IDC comments. The thing to consider is that you guys are in the business of providing a service, not a product. Even if others take your code and host their own IDC service, they would still have to convince all your users to switch to them, losing all their accounts, ratings etc.
And this is simply not going to happen. As the largest IDC service provider out there, people will be inclined to use you, which will further solidify this status and continue the circle.

What do you think?