Forum that gives users their own blogs?

What are your thoughts on allowing USER blogs on a forum community, where the posted blogs can have comments? Lets say the community is an auto tech oriented site like honda tech where the users discuss their cars and mods. Would a small forum benefit from this feature or suffer from it? I'm going back and forth in my head about this:

- Having blogs will decrease the new forum posts. Enabling blogs will miss out on potentially VERY popular topics, stickys, etc. since the users are commenting on the blog instead of the forum.

- Having blogs increases the user base since they can blog about themselves, their mods / car, and post blog articles. It gives users more of a feeling of participation and importance in the community.

Another idea is that I can have blogging enabled after a certain post count. Yet another idea is to disable blog commenting, so a forum topic would be created to advertise their updated blog and handle comments.

I can side with either method, so I'm eager to hear opinions. Thanks

I have Blogs enabled on my vBulletin forum. Not many use them.
I think it's more of a novelty than anything. People leave more Profile Comments than Blog Comments.

Blogs on forums are more for the staff than anything else. Perfect for company forums or forums that are kind of an authority of something.

Use Wordpress MU but it's not included in the forum software, install it by yourself. I found a hack for vB to reserve a name in WP-MU once a new user is registered and activate it when the user wants to. Just google it. Or use Invision with IPBlogs.

FroDaddy said:

What are your thoughts on allowing USER blogs on a forum community, where the posted blogs can have comments? ...Would a small forum benefit from this feature or suffer from it?

Click to expand...

I'm going back and forth about it too. Also about giving people the ability to hold "conversations" on their profile (now called "social networking") pages.

Right now, my feeling is that this will be destructive of the public discussion that is the heart of forums. Though, it may be--if it is managed properly--that it only reduces the vast quantity of inane threads that fill our off-topic sections.

Either way, I think its too soon to know what it will do.

--don

Nah, I have profiles with user comments. They hardly get used at all anymore.
A novelty for a few days and then that's about it. I think the more things you can offer your users, the better off you are.

Thanks for the responses, anyone else care to offer an opinion?

The thing I see is that unless the users base themselves from your forum, they probably won't use something like a blog.

Figure many of the users already have a website, or MySpace, Livejournal, Blogger, or whatever. Most likely, they'll continue to use those areas for blogging and stuff because they can network with others not on that forum and have that as their center for those actions.

Perhaps the best thing is to ask your users if they would like that and would use it. Lets those who are in the community give you feedback on what they are interested in seeing on the site. Maybe you'd also get some other suggestions for a feature that would be more popular.

Most of my members don't use that feature at all on my forum.
I personally think its kinda neat- and those that do use it- do it rarely.