Blogging

[Wayne Luke]

The hottest new thing on the Internet is community-based Blogging with sites such as Livejournal making a big splash. Has anyone thought about turning their community into such a site with customizable parameters for the user? Maybe allow them to create their own sub-community with customizable graphics (maybe chosen from several defaults) and color schemes?

 

[Anonymous]

With all the horror stories I hear from folks that run boards about real life problems, I wouldn't even consider hosting blogs.

I'm gonna stick with hobby type stuff that isn't as serious as a persons personal life.

 

[Wayne Luke]

I wouldn't think that would be a real issue. Optimally, you would only have it accessible from the user's profile and they would be in charge of moderating it.

 

[jilly]

I had a problem with something like this..

we had a board for 'diary' style writing, and it turned out that most people, when writing their diary or blog-like stuff, just got into too many different areas and topics, some that were offensive to the regulars, and starting using terms and discussing subjects that we dont discuss on the other boards at the site - moderating that forum became exhausting and was causing bad blood, so I ended up putting a new field in the profile called "My Online Diary" and had people get a free one somewhere, like blogger or something, and link to their journal there - and then they could say whatever they wanted, without me having to hear about it. When the posts were on a board on my site, all the people reading it expected it to stay under the same guidelines we use for all the other boards. Now when they click on a link to go to someone's online diary somewhere else, they know they are going 'offsite', and are getting uncensored thoughts from these people, from their own diary somewhere else...

 

[Wayne Luke]

Yeah but you made the mistake of making it a public forum and not allowing people to moderate themselves.

I am envisioning an area that is completely separate from the main forums but still uses the forum structure. These "Blogs" will be personal forums that aren't visible on the Forum index page nor will they be searchable from the main search engine. Each new member will have the option of creating a blog, customizing its look and feel and creating posts.

This is also not possible in any forum package that I know of so I am just thinking out loud really. Bouncing ideas off the virtual whiteboard that a collection of people can create.

 

[Kathy]

I thought of the idea of offering blogging because I thought my forum topic would lend itself to the benefit of diary/blogging.

I ran it past a few of my admin assistants who gave me thumbs down. Yes, moderating themselves would help but letting others reply and letting others read...my assistants thought that it would lend itself to adding to the drama queens on our forums trying to out-do each other's horror stories.

So I dumped the idea for the time being.

I don't know the answer but for me, I would think a diary is private and should just be for your own benefit and not for public replies.

I don't know...since I've never thought I needed to blog online. I do know its a hot activity on the net.

 

[jilly]

I think it would probably work well for tech sites or hobby sites

I think for sites that are 'support' sites, like mine and Kathy's, it just is too problematic - but I could see it working well on sites that were not emotionally investive..

 

[RedBox]

We offer it. We started out using the journal hack for vB2, and it was extremely popular. When we realized it would not work with vB3, we spent several months searching for an alternative and convincing our members that it would be worth the hassle of starting over again. We chose the commercial verson of pMachine. It's not integrated with the forum, unfortunately. However, it still works well enough. Our journal members do not get an individual blog, because it works as a community blog. When you go to the journal page, you view the 15 most recent entries by various members, all on one page (First 500 characters of each entry, only). On each entry, you can click "more by me" to view an index of entries by that particular member.

The bad thing is that advertising networks like Burst or Tribal Fusion will not allow ads on journal pages, because they are considered personal. We do put affiliate banners on them, though. The cost of operating pMachine was more than we expected it to be, because it seemed to increase server load so much that we had to move the database to a vps to get it off our dedicated server. We just moved to a much more powerful machine and have it all together now, and it seems to be supporting it well enough. However, I don't recommend pmachine to anyone that doesn't have the resources to support it.

Our members really love having it. Most choose to allow comments and really thrive on the feedback of other members.

 

[Atwookie]

As far as blogging goes, I offer to host blogs for members of my forums on my webspace. I use MovableType to administrate them, and I can give them complete control over their own specific blog, which makes things easy on me. Then I can just sorta set it and forget it if I'd like.

However, I do run a hobby/whatever/Anime & RPC & Comic Site. Which is probably why it works.

 

[Wayne Luke]

The bad thing is that advertising networks like Burst or Tribal Fusion will not allow ads on journal pages, because they are considered personal.

That is ok. I would never use them anyway. They just rip publishers off. I would rather sell my own ads or not have external advertising at all.