The balkanization of communities by Forum || Blog Disconnect + some suggestions?

[Tigratrus]

This is my number 1 problem with vBlog at this point.

vBulletin is the heart and soul of our site. In fact, we've stretched and extended the system so that our vBulletin pretty much *is* the site. After running vBlogetin(Blog Mod) for quite a few months now we've found the following:

1. The Community has become somewhat fragmented into Bloggers | Posters. The Blog system is a parallel system for self expression and has had a tendency to siphon off some of our more creative posters into blogging instead of posting in the forums. Other members rarely see the content posted in the Blogs despite our best efforts to promote them and the "Latest Blog entries" CMPS module on the right hand column of almost every page in our site.

2. The vast majority of our new members come to our site looking for the solutions to specific problems. They do NOT search in the blogs for those answers, they search the forums.

3. We used to have a forum based blogging system, a single forum called "Progress Blogs" where each member that wanted to started a thread to chronicle the progress of their particular project. Since we shut that down and moved to a Blog based system we have had a *marked* decrease in both the creation of new Blogs that follow a Project AND a major reduction in the amount of participation of the community in the Blogs that ARE created, as they just don't follow them. And this during a period where our total membership has increased by a factor of 10X to about 21000 members.

4. The few members in our site that are really interested in,and do a good job of, blogging generally go off to another site like Blogger and just link to their blog in their signature.


It's important to remember a few things about many people that post on forums:

1. They often have a limited amount of time available to post and they choose whether to post in the forums *or* in the blogs.

2. They crave attention and feedback from their peers on the board. The blogs end up being very much an out of sight/out of mind situation for many of our members. They spend a lot of time working out their blog entries and then they get a couple of replies, if they are lucky.

3. If they don't get the responses they crave they tend to lose interest and go do something else.

I totally understand that the current setup may work well for some vBulletin sites and I'm really happy for them, because it seems quite well engineered and efficient. Unfortunately it lacks any meaningful integration with the forums at all. I had *really* hoped that given Jelsoft's unmatchable depth of expertise with the vBulletin system that they would have leveraged that to produce a system that could be used as a stand alone parallel system *or* be integrated *INTO* the forums so that they synergize with the forums and improve the experience for the members of sites that want to function that way.

My ideal system would allow the admin to configure it so that it encourages and facilitates cross pollination between the Blog system and the Forum system.

In specific I'd like to see:

1. The ability to click a button on a post to add it to your blog with link in the blog entry that links back to the post, this provides a sort of scrap booking function so members can collect useful posts for future reference.

2. The ability to specify particular forums where every post made by the OP is automatically added to the OP's Blog with a special Blog entry category (configurable or default to the thread title would be ideal) and a link back to the post. And vice versa. This would allow the Blog system to act as a sort of index to the Blog Thread and provide a portal from the Blogging system to the Forum. It would also put all the posts in the FORUM where they would show up in the Search.php results (This is a big *BIIIG* deal from our experience). And it empowers the many members that just don't "GET" blogging to have a way to participate in the Blog via the thread instead of the Blog. The Bloggers get to Blog, the Posters get to post and they both get to interact with each other in their preferred medium.

I know that this would lead to duplicate content, and that's a valid concern, but I don't care in the slightest. My primary concern is the health and growth of the sense of community that we have tried so hard to promote. Having the Blogs as a separate parallel system does NOT encourage that sense of community, not on our site, and judging by comments I've seen on other threads we're not alone.

Lest I give the false impression that I view Blogs as necessarily bad for a forum in general, I feel obligated to point out that there are many great uses that we have found for blogs. They're great for many things, they make a wonderful portfolio and extended profile sort of thing. They make a great place to simply ramble on about personal philosophy, site updates etc.


Jelsoft has an unparalleled opportunity here to push the boundaries and create a Forum/Blog hybrid that creates genuine synergy between the Forums and the Blogs. I'm sure that there would be many admins that would choose *not* to use the hybridization features, and that's totally fine. It would have it's drawbacks without a doubt. But for those forums that would benefit from the gestalt that the two systems could create if they interacted I think it would be totally worth it.

: Phew::

Ok... It's not the first time I've said most of the above, and for those that have read it elsewhere I apologize for being the broken record at the party;). But I figured that posting it now, it had a half-way decent chance of being seen by a developer, and I'm honestly curious if anyone else feels the same way?

James and Susan

[MJM]

Well said, and I appreciate you taking the time to explain this scenario.
I cannot risk introducing this blog addon if it could affect the community spirit that has taken so long to build at our forums.

One of the reasons why both members and visitors utilize our site is because we created an organizational structure with which to participate in or find information.
I would expect the same from this blog addon.

Hopefully we'll soon get over this re-inventing of the wheel and can set our trajectories to go where no bloggin community has gone before. ;)

[GamerzWorld]

A good post with some very good ideas

[Gladius]

Indeed, I hope Jelsoft acts on it.

[jgas]

very good post and ideas..i like it a lot :D

i think we are all hoping Jelsoft to act on it ;)

[wiredinoc]

Perfectly articulated, and a genuine concern of mine as well. We're going to move forward with the implementation as it is a new feature of our site, but I share all of the same concerns. From everything I am seeing, this is a VERY 1.0 product, and I hope our early adoption does not shoot us in the foot.

[MJM]

BTW (case in point) Thanks for posting this at the forum and not your blog,
I would never have found/read it! :eek:

If I were to provide the blog "as-is", I'd definitely want to provide guidelines of what types of entries are more appropriate for the blog and entries more appropriate for the forum.

For this reason I would initially give blog use to user/groups who would in turn "set the standards" for others to follow.

I also hope that in the future we will have thread/post/blog Move Merge and other moderation functions fully integrated between blog entries and forum entries.

Categorization of entries is a cool feature but admin needs to be able to set up default categories and a users also needs a personal category section.
This is essentially something that is sorely needed as a standard part of the users profile page. This should be provided regardless of the blog.
And I really like this idea of a user being able to tag forum thread entries, past and present, so that they will be auto displayed in a designated profile category as a title/link - which when hovered on shows a preview of entry - just like with forum thread entries.

But overall my opinion is that the forums must continue to serve as the main venue for posting community related issues.

The blog addon does provide users with added permissions tools for viewing and commenting on entries, but I think one needs to be careful about setting up any scenarios in which hitherto entrusted members are directed to no permissions pages.
This could lead to unnecessary hierarchical divisions - us vs them situations at the site.
In other words, the current forum system provides methods in which what you don't have access to, you don't see - so you don't know what you've been denied access to = no reason to feel left out.
I do not know if the blog entries restricted access/commenting works in the same way or if users will encounter more no permissions pages when going to links etc.

[Grover]

A great post, very well explained Tigratrus!

I am also a bit worried that the introduction of Blogs on my site will have a negative effect on the participations in the forums and vice versa.


I totally understand that the current setup may work well for some vBulletin sites and I'm really happy for them, because it seems quite well engineered and efficient. Unfortunately it lacks any meaningful integration with the forums at all. I had *really* hoped that given Jelsoft's unmatchable depth of expertise with the vBulletin system that they would have leveraged that to produce a system that could be used as a stand alone parallel system *or* be integrated *INTO* the forums so that they synergize with the forums and improve the experience for the members of sites that want to function that way.


Exactly my thoughts. I often stated in many suggestions-threads that I miss real integration of functionality in vBulletin in general. It's not only the Blog, it's the Calendar (http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1398582&postcount=20) as well for example and many other things. Gladly, we have seen some integrated functionality added to vB recently, like the Reported Posts that go to a forum in your Staf Zone (instead of only going to your external email).

In what way does vBulletin stand apart from all other Blog services (Wordpress, Blogger and all the rest of it) that have been available for a very long time now? Exactly, the fact that it is a vBulletin product that integrates with the forum. Well... it has the potential to integrate anyway.

But in the current state... why would someone dish their Wordpress blog and use the vBulletin Blog one? Not because of the features of vBulletin Blog, because Wordpress has more. Not because of the way you can customize the layout of your Blog, because it's not possible with vBlog at the moment. But all those things will be possible in a future vBulletin Blog version. When we have arrived at that point, the KEY thing that will set vBlog apart from all the external Blog services is tight integration with the forum.

The only integration we see at this point in vBulletin is links. We see a link in the navbar, we see a link in the postbit and we see a link in the user's profile. Real integration is so much more in my view, like you have explained very clearly in your suggestions.

[Jamie Edwards]

I totally agree - I get the feeling the integration is fairly lazy; i.e. having a separate blog control panel and not fully integrating it into the User CP. This is just confusing to the user (only having this link in the User CP to access this control panel).

Likewise that threads cannot be easily turned into blog posts and vice-versa shows that integration is no where near in depth as it should be.

I'd have expected a lot more from a product by the vB developers themselves - it would be excusable for me if this was done by a community developer over at vB.org.

I am sure I am not speculating that it was very much a rushed project (possibly to at least release something to sure-up market confidence in vB against IBP?).

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=235507

... Both in response to feedback from customers, to allow easier development, and in order to bring the Blog to market more quickly, it has been decided that the social networking component that had been originally intended to be released as part of the vBulletin Blog product will now instead be released with vBulletin 3.7.0...

[Carnage-]

what would be quite cool is if you could disable comments on the blogs and instead get it to start a thread in a specific forum for discussion of that blog entry similar to how reported posts can be set to work.

[Tigratrus]

It's heartening to see that there are a lot of other admins out there that feel similarly, I'm actually surprised that we haven't seen any dissenting opinions.

I have to admit though, that it's a bit disturbing that there hasn't been any commentary from Jelsoft, despite dev responses on many other issues? I'm starting to wonder if real integration/synergy (for those that want/need it)with the Forums is simply not on their radar at all? If that's the case, we (meaning our site) may have to stay with an alternative like vBlogetin simply because that integration is vital to fostering the sense of community that's so vital to us.

I remain surprised that Jelsoft didn't immediately fasten onto the idea of how the Blogs could make the *Forum* experience better... I mean at the end of the day, the Forums is what vBulletin is all about. That's Jelsoft's area of expertise and the ability to provide tight integration with the forums is the unique capacity that Jelsoft brings to the table in developing a Blog system IMO.

I think Grover's post summed up some of those issues very well and I agree totally with his points. The fact that we still haven't heard much of anything about Jelsoft's looking at ways to provide that kind of integration/synergy I find a bit ominous, and frankly, baffling. I mean why would you *not* leverage your greatest area of expertise when developing a new product? ::shaking head::

Anyway, I remain impressed by the fundamentally clean and optimized nature of the code... But I can't see trying to sell our existing members on converting. And we haven't a prayer of luring any of our members with wordpress/blogger blogs to use our system as we don't really have anything unique to offer. Tie-ins with our forum would offer that, as we have some *really* fanatic members, but so far it's very vanilla... ::sigh::

We can only hope that there *IS* something in the works that we simply don't know about yet.

James and Susan

[MJM]

We can only hope that there *IS* something in the works that we simply don't know about yet.

I'm hoping that this "something" will be revealed in 3.7, and hopefully we can share a peek into the crystal ball for vB4.
It is, after all, "our" (site admin/ own customers) vision for the future that developers need to fix their visors on and find appropriate methodologies to make requested features and functionalities possible.

It might be presumed that it is the developers who come up with all the great ideas and so forth, but this can't always be expected to be the case.
What I would expect, even more so, is that they are the pros who would take an idea that is presented to them, examine it's presented variations and ramifications, and come up with the code that makes it not only possible but very practical.
Making it possible is the part that is totally in the hands of the developers.
Making it practical to our needs is something that site admins, our customers, and the vB development team need to work together on.

I do see the blog addon as having potential use at our site for personal use, though I'll wait this one out for a while till I see how 3.7 > 4 pans out.

What I find (as rather insulting), is it's portrayal by definition as a Blog, that it is something new.
"Blogging" (in the forums) has been going on for years.
We just haven't had the need to give it that name.

[Freddie Bingham]

In regards to suggestion #1, I've made comments at http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1417319#post1417319

In regards to suggestion #2, this really seems like the goal is content duplication. If the main reason for that is the searching, the 3.x framework simply does not allow us to provide a method to search all products from a single search interface. In 4.x, we hope to alleviate this by introducing a method that allows all products to be searched from a single interface as well as providing a method to search multiple systems in one instance.

[Tigratrus]

Thanks for the reply!

Regarding #2, the searching is only part of it, though it accomplishes that too and visibility in the search results is VERY important.

The other part is the inclusion of both sides of the community in the discussion. I'm not saying that ALL blogs would work this way!! Heck no... Many people will want to have a traditional Blog that they use for just chronicalling their thoughts, sharing their recent trip to the galapogos islands etc. We have a few installers that use their blog a s a portfolio showing past jobs they have done with clients posting comments and testimonials. Some of them use the Testimonial concept I described on the Blog this Post thread.

The basic problem is that you can have (as we do) a split that develops where there are people that use the blogging system and rarely visit the forums, and there are people that use the forums and rarely even notice the Blogs. On our particular site they both share a common desire, they want to share the events of their project as they work their way though it. In that case we really *REALLY* want/need a way to intertwine the two systems, this allows the entire community to participate regardless of their preference for one format or the other. That participation is VITAL to the success of the system and community as a whole.

I *KNOW* it's duplication, I understand the objection. But the abilty to bring both groups together more than makes up for it, hands down and walking away. It's a big enough issue for us that it makes the content duplication totally a non-issue. We want/love the ability to host blogs on our site, there are many useful things about them and there are people that prefer that format. But they also crave the comments and suggestions of the entire community when they are planning/working on their project. And there are many *MANY* menbers of the community that don't look at and have zero interest in Blogs. By making it nigh impossible for the two systems to interact we split the community into 2 unequal halves and run the risk of losing critical mass in either, and at the very least we deprive members of all the feedback and suggestions they *COULD* be getting.

I also completely understand that this is something that will *NOT* be useful on all sites, and might well be detrimental to some. So simply make it optional. For those that have a use for it great, we can turn it on/configure it and have the Bloggers and the Posters interact and be one big happy family. For those that don't want it, also great, they simply leave it turned off. In what way is that different from the many many optional features in vBulletin itself?

I think it should be apparent from the support on this thread that we aren't the only vBulletin admins with this issue? And keep in mind that there are probably *many* vBulletin admins that aren't even *looking* at the Blog, or reading anything in this forum, because they have already decided that Blogs are inimical to forums because of exactly the concerns raised here.

I know for a fact that several admins have posted their feelings (and how many feel that way but don't bother to post?) that Blogs detract from the interactions on the Forums, so they are *not* interested in installing a Blog addon. I'd think that having a way to remove that objection and thus widen vBlog's market to include those Admins/Forums would be something worth developing a few extra features for...

::shrug::

Anyway, I look forward to hear other's opinions.

James and Susan

[Freddie Bingham]

You have obviously spent a great deal of time considering the features that would make the blog an attractive addon for yourself. Please give me a detailed list of exactly how this duplication is to function and I'll go over the technical details of feasibility. The list needs to be quite descriptive, when I do this, this should happen, this should appear, this should be put there, there, and there.

[Jamie Edwards]

Freddie; Although I like to see developers taking time to consider user's individual wants and whims, I would much rather prefer them to first analyse what the majority of people who maintain blog software do with that blog software before analysing the fesability of niche requests.

I do not think vBlog is 'there' yet with regards to basic functionality, let alone that described in #2.

[Freddie Bingham]

Freddie; Although I like to see developers taking time to consider user's individual wants and whims, I would much rather prefer them to first analyse what the majority of people who maintain blog software do with that blog software before analysing the fesability of niche requests.

I do not think vBlog is 'there' yet with regards to basic functionality, let alone that described in #2.
Jamie, feel free to make your suggestions in another thread, I've got quite a large list of suggested features going at the present.

[Jamie Edwards]

Ok, for reference: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=241453

[Tigratrus]

Freddie; Although I like to see developers taking time to consider user's individual wants and whims, I would much rather prefer them to first analyse what the majority of people who maintain blog software do with that blog software before analysing the fesability of niche requests.

I do not think vBlog is 'there' yet with regards to basic functionality, let alone that described in #2.

Jamie,

Given the number of supporting respondents to this thread I hardly think it qualifies as an "Individual's wants and whims". Please keep in mind that the vast majority of people that share my views are quite likely to not read or post at all on blogging issues as they have already decided that Blogs are not a good addon as they detract from the interaction on the forums.

I don't happen to agree with that viewpoint, as I think they CAN be a great addition to a vBulletin site, but attention has to be paid to the WAY the two systems interact.

I also happen to totally agree with your comments about the features that need to be added to bring vBlog up to anywhere near par with Wordpress/Blogger etc. But even when you get there, WHY would a member move to a vBlog blog? What's the motivator? What makes vBlog unique and different?

IMO the answer is your community. That's what makes forums work in general (Heck, isn't that kinda the Jelsoft slogan? Building communities?), and *that's* what you have to offer that other more robust blog systems don't. I'm just trying to find a way to leverage that community to make it happen.

Nice name btw! I'm named after my great uncle Jamie... Small world ;).

James and Susan

[Tigratrus]

A few related threads for people that think I’m on some lone crusade:

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=241470 (http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=241470)
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=241870
There are several mentions in the request thread, the very first request was for a way to move threads into blogs http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=234079&page=2 (http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=234079&page=2)
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1413475#post1413475 (http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1413475#post1413475) is the announcement thread after I posted my concerns origninally.
And when the addons were first announced: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1394620#post1394620

I’m sure there are tons more but those were the ones I could think of off the top of my head.

Almost done writing up the Reponse/Outline for Freddie...

James and Susan

[Lizard King]

Jamie,

Given the number of supporting respondents to this thread I hardly think it qualifies as an "Individual's wants and whims". Please keep in mind that the vast majority of people that share my views are quite likely to not read or post at all on blogging issues as they have already decided that Blogs are not a good addon as they detract from the interaction on the forums.

I don't happen to agree with that viewpoint, as I think they CAN be a great addition to a vBulletin site, but attention has to be paid to the WAY the two systems interact.

I also happen to totally agree with your comments about the features that need to be added to bring vBlog up to anywhere near par with Wordpress/Blogger etc. But even when you get there, WHY would a member move to a vBlog blog? What's the motivator? What makes vBlog unique and different?

IMO the answer is your community. That's what makes forums work in general (Heck, isn't that kinda the Jelsoft slogan? Building communities?), and *that's* what you have to offer that other more robust blog systems don't. I'm just trying to find a way to leverage that community to make it happen.

Nice name btw! I'm named after my great uncle Jamie... Small world ;).

James and Susan
Sorry to say this James but trust me there are way more user who doesn't share their opinions just because they are happy with the current features also donot want to enter any kind of discussion.

[Tigratrus]

*Please* read the entire post? There are parts in the discussion before the outline/example that are valid and important, thanks!



There are an amazing number of forums out there that currently HAVE forum based blogs, if you were to take a survey I’m sure you’ll find there are a *lot* (nice technical term that eh? ;) ). Members post a Thread and post periodically to it, then other members respond. THAT is the default standard for this functionality in a Forum, and it works great. In fact, it works so well that we had to close our “Progress Blog” forum to new posts in order to get anyone to use the Blogging system, and blogs have been struggling ever since even while the forum has been growing by leaps and bounds.

A Hybrid forum allows that original functionality to continue without a single change while it gets Blogging started. Members would suddenly start having “Read my Blog” links in their postbit (assuming that’s how you configure you postbit template ;) ) and the Blogs would be off and running WITHOUT leaving Forum focused folks behind, everyone gets to participate.

Those people that are asking for the ability to import threads into blogs? This is why. This way it’s a clean, seamless transition for the members, and the community gets to go on doing what they were doing before, there’s no loss of interaction or creation of a division in the community between those that Blog and those that don’t. Whichever format the entry is posted in, it’s seen and commented on by the *whole* community. And the project related (in our case) posts/entries are all in the forums as well as the blogs, so they show up in the vBulletin searches as well as the Recent/today’s posts. That’s critical. We have a ton of members who really never see anything if it doesn’t show up in the Recent Posts list.

I really can’t stress enough that (obviously IMO) this is the best shot you have at getting Forum Admins who are perfectly happy with their forum based Blogs to consider vBlog, I’m fairly sure that there are more Admins that fall into that category than some might think. They just don’t read/post on Blog related issues, for obvious reasons.




Not being an SEO person I can’t say if it would help, but maybe no-follow tags for webbots on links between Blog and Thread would help a little?








Forum-Blog (Hybrid)

The goal of the proposal to allow the creation of a Forum-Blog Hybrid (I suppose tecnically it's a Thread-Blog Hybrid) that draws the Posters into the Blogging system and the Bloggers into the Posting system. Note that by default it would be turned off, until you designate a forum as a Hybrid this should have zero effect on your site.


The Admin can, at his election, specify a forum or forums to designate as Hybrid(s), likely via the Forum Manager in the ACP. This would create a “Category” option for all members that matches the name of the newly created Hybrid forum. This assumes that an Admin can set default Category values, which many have requested. If that’s not available then the category will need to be created when the member creates a thread as described in #2 below.
When a member creates a new thread in a Hybrid forum a category in that member’s Blog is created (if it doesn’t exist) that matches the Forum Name.
When any post is submitted within a Hybrid Forum by the OP (including the first post) an entry is created within the OP’s Blog with a Category matching the Forum Name (as created in 2) and the title and content of the entry matching the post. A link from the entry is also created (ideally the entry title or part of it) that links back to the post in the thread.
Optionally, depending on difficulty of implementation and (ideally) admin election) posts by other members can be likewise be created as comments to the last blog entry with the matching category.
The inverse of the system would also ideally be available though optional. I.E. When a Blogger creates the first entry in a reserved Category (matching the name of the designated Hybrid forum) an entry is created in the appropriate forum with the same title and content.
That’s pretty much it.

Example:

We have a Forum named “Progress Blog”. With this system we can designate that Forum as a Hybrid. This creates a new category value for all members, “Progress Blog”.

Now a member (John) posts a new thread in the Progress Blog Forum with the title “They came-They saw-They ripped out to the studs and joists”. A new entry is automatically added to John’s Blog with the category “Progress Blog” and the entry title of “They came-They saw-They ripped out to the studs and joists” with the same content as the post and a link back to the thread itself.

Betty finds Blogs confusing, heck she just doesn’t get the point, but she loves keeping up with her friend’s renovation projects and reads the “Progress Blogs” religiously (we have a LOT of these members). She checks what’s new and reads the thread then posts a reply and a new matching comment is automatically added to John’s Blog as a comment to the last blog entry in the “Progress Blog” category.

A bit later Nicole (being blog savvy and subscribed via RSS to those that she finds interesting) reads John’s Blog and posts a comment that tells him a few tips that she discovered while doing her project, and compliments him on how it’s going.

Betty reads Nicole’s comment (in the thread) and realizes that she would have had the same problem when she starts her project and posts a thank you with a quick question to Nicole about how to avoid a problem with the electrical installation.

Nicole reads and answers the question in the Blog.

John reads Nicole’s answer and thanks both of them because he hadn’t thought of that particular issue. They both read his thank you and feel good that their input was appreciated.



I’m sure there are facets of this that I haven’t thought of (there always are ;) )but that’s what myself, my co-founder and our mods have come up with as the ideal system for our use, and when I approached our most die-hard bloggers and suggested this solution they were *really* on board with it. I was specifically told that the number of responses they got on their blogs compared to the old Progress Blog threads was disheartening. I’ve been trying to find a way to do this ever since, as without it I think we’ll have to reopen the Progress Blog forum and watch the Blog system mostly wither away.

Thanks in advance for your time and patience in reading this.

James and Susan

[Freddie Bingham]

In theory, such a system would not be difficult to implement since we have apis for creating new threads, new entries, new replies, new comments.

I do get hung up on the talk of a user knowing how to use forums and not blogs and vice versa. Is that really a realistic situation? Since we create both products, they do share a similar usage approach, if you can use one then you probably can use both.

In the end, I do see the benefit for some forums in using the blogs as a type of portal into the forum at the user level instead of using the blogs in a typical approach. I will add this suggestion to the list with a note to do further examination of requirements since while it seems easy enough on the surface, annoying little niggles can always pop up.

Example being, I make a blog post and it gets syndicated into the forum. A mod comes along and deletes my forum post. What happens to my blog post? Does it stick around or does it get zapped as well? What if it was just soft deleted. Does my blog entry get soft deleted as well? Well if it does I'll just go back and undelete since I have that permission in my blog. Did that just undelete my forum post, the one that a mod just deleted?

What if I delete my blog entry. I don't have permission to delete on the forums so what happens to my corresponding thread. Does it get nuked as well or does it stay as it were?

These are the annoying bits to features like this.

I will add this to the suggestions list as it will need much more thought made in the technical area. For simplicity sake, I would say that modification or deletion of one object would

[Tigratrus]

Thanks for the response, looks like it got cut off... probably my fault for typing too much;).

The ideal would probably be to link the two objects together so what happens to one happens to both, but if that makes it too much more difficult ::shrug:: whatever works is fine.

Don't underestimate the power of inertia. It's not so much a question of "Knowing how" so much as seeing a reason to. We actually *do* have many many people that post in the forums but never even look at the blogs. Add that to the fact that they probably won't get any responses if they DO put something in a blog entry or if they *do* get responses it's virtually certain to be less than they would get if they posted in the Forum. ::shrug::

And then people always search the forums, never the blogs, when they are looking for the answer to a question. So that's where they jump in and participate.

The forum system is excellent for visibility, the blogs aren't even close. Which is natural because the forum IS the underlying system.

All the vBulletin forums out there that still have a thread based blogging system are an untapped market for vBlog, this is the perfect migration solution for them, as well as all the other things it does. ::shrug::

Sorry if I seem really aggressive about this, but as I'm sure you can tell, it's been a focus for quite awhile for us. Between a lot of other folks that feel the lack of a reason to put Blogs on a Forum, but don't see a solution and or aren't motivated to make one and the people that have the "Blogs are Blogs and Forums are Forums" attitude I feel like a fish out of water trying to explain not only WHAT I want to do, but WHY and HOW.

I really appreciate the opportunity to lay all this out for someone that has the ability to actually DO something about it.

James and Susan

[karlin]

I think this thread does raise some very central issues and concerns about why people set up boards, why individuals or groups use blogs, and the dynamics of board communities.

I've had a blog for over 5 years, moderated and admin'd on a couple of boards, and then run my own board for the past 2.5 years. I've built up a strong, focused, friendly community around the board (www.cavaliertalk.com), and I'd like to give them more features, so have added on Zoints. While some really like Zoints and created profiles most do not use the blog feature (which is admittedly quite limited). Those that do have had the experience mentioned... most members don't see their blogs or follow them so there's no real motivation to post to them.

But as a long time blogger, and a board admin, I too would have concerns that introducing a parallel blog system would split the commnity into those who make posts to blogs, and those who make posts to the board. My sense right now of communities like Ning, where you can have a blog and gallery and ALSO go to a board facility is that the board becomes the afterthought.

I welcome the addition of the vBlog add-on and really like that there is an aggregator page as I think that helps overcome some of the problems with Zoints -- that the posts are not seen unless someone goes to the person's profile. And I can see ways in which my community would really like having the addition of a blog. But I do wonder whether these are formats that can live harmoniously together for a lot of people, without weakening the board into a secondary community.

I would love to see tighter integration too down the line -- as long as the blog software is an add-on to the board and not a standalone blog community product, it needs to work in a way that keeps the board central.

I am thinking about using it though and will likely try it out to see what my members do with it. Theroetically it SHOULD work well because my community is focused on dogs, and a blog would enable people to maintain a great personal profile (for themselves and/or their dogs!) and add images with more context than a gallery.

At the end of the day you never know how anything will work until the live community gets its hands on something and real people try it. For some communities it will likely work really well, and for others, may atomise the community.

PS Thanks to the vBulletin team for such a great board product. I love it; so much easier to upgrade and operate than the software I was using (phpBB). Using a couple of features and one add-on I have reduced my spam registrations from 20+ a day to only ONE in the past 5 months, allowing me to focus on the board content and community, not dull admin firefighting. It's the best $160 I have spent in ages. :cool:

[Mirrorball]

Forums have always been about providing people with a common interest a tool with which they can communicate. The basic format is: Users post their thoughts, other users reply, and a discussion ensues. Other features are just icing on the cake. The problem with vBlog is that it provides yet another way to do the same things and is just going to introduce more competition to your forum. It's like cars and buses, they are both ways to go from one place to another and you go to work either by car or by bus. You can't integrate them. With vBlog, your forum's members are going to post their thoughts either on the forums or on their blogs and your community will split. It can't be helped. I think vBlog is a mistake. Surely blogs are popular and successful nowadays but it doesn't mean they play well with forums. What could be done is a blog theme for forums or change the scheme of topic categorization from forums to tags. That could work. But when you provide two tools that do the same job, users will use either one or the other.

I'm also afraid of social networking features. Most sites are centered around a subject and unless it's a dating or relationships forum, it doesn't matter if members are single or married. With generic profile pages, the community will only lose focus and start to compete with big sites like MySpace and Facebook, and in this case it will lose. Successful software has to stay focused and do what it is supposed to do well. Why would I waste my precious server resources to people who just want to talk about their own lives in my music site?

The one thing that Jelsoft did well was provide vBlog as an add-on and not ship it along vBulletin.

[bulbasnore]

I like the kind of integration features that are being discussed here. Two things that would make them useful to us:
1. Postbit integration - a user who has posted a new blog entry, should have a 'new blog' icon of some kind show up in the postbit; if a user has a blog at all, it should show also be marked in their posts in the postbit.
2. Blog Category contraints - settable as an option, off/mandatory-categories/mandatory+user-categories by the admins, with the admins able to designate a default category and an option to let the user alter the default setting for which category their cross-post/scrapbook entry goes into.

[Liandrin]

I am reposting a message from this thread because it seems like it would be relevant here:

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1495633#post1495633

"1. If I create a new blog entry, does it create a new thread in the forum area? And if someone comments on the blog, do their comments appear in the forum thread as well? I've read that you can convert a thread into a blog manually, but I was hoping that a blog could simultaneously exist as as a thread without having to manually copy the entries.

2. Is there a good example of vbulletin blog out in the wild that I can look at? The ones hosted as examples here don't seem to be integrated with an forums. I can't figure out exactly how it will work."

[alexjc]

Tigratrus,

Yet another vote on your side! I think your opinion is spot on... I just registered the Blog software, and I'm now seriously regretting it for these reasons.

Sadly, version 2 doesn't address the problems. :eek:

alexjc

[Grover]

I am not regretting my purchase, because I strongly feel that Blogcapabilities are a valuable addition to my community. Except, they aren't in the current state. :(

It seems that with the latest beta releases of vB and Blog the issue of missing integration has not been solved. Like I stated before, in my view one of the KEY elements missing throughout the whole Jelsoft productline is : i.n.t.e.g.r.a.t.i.o.n.

Tigratrus mentioned it already in his (their) openingpost and I think it's a little frustrating for us as customers that not much has been done to improve this KEY element of integration with the forums. My Moderators are even complaining now about this obvious problem. Because the software doesn't deliver what's absolutely needed , the Blogs are far from a success on my site. In fact, they are almost not used at all. And that is rather remarkable if your realize that I produce a community that is perfectly suited for Blogs.

Hopefully we can see a solution soon. Begin with integrating this fantastic software more with the forum and after that step, please provide us with a Jelsoft produced CMS. The CMS is the missing glue between the different Jelsoft products, who now in their current state stand too much on their own. We need a bridge to connect those products together.

[elfman]

... Jelsoft has an unparalleled opportunity here to push the boundaries and create a Forum/Blog hybrid that creates genuine synergy between the Forums and the Blogs. I'm sure that there would be many admins that would choose *not* to use the hybridization features, and that's totally fine. It would have it's drawbacks without a doubt. But for those forums that would benefit from the gestalt that the two systems could create if they interacted I think it would be totally worth it.

: Phew::

Ok... It's not the first time I've said most of the above, and for those that have read it elsewhere I apologize for being the broken record at the party;). But I figured that posting it now, it had a half-way decent chance of being seen by a developer, and I'm honestly curious if anyone else feels the same way?

James and Susan

James and Susan, I found your post through google while researching the identical thing, and became a member here in order to contact you.

I've been promoting that same thing for 8 or 9 years privately, and just started doing so publicly after recognizing that community software is so well developed that I can't develop it myself.

If I understand you correctly, we're thinking of nearly identical features and benefits to this blog/forum integration. I wrote more on it here (http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/posts-added-to-all-mu-blogs-showing-on-one-forum).

I'm blown away that no one as far as I can tell has built this. It's so obvious! And still, people argue against it when I bring it up.

To do this correctly, it requires database integration between the blogs and forums with no duplication of data. Almost exactly as you say:

Posters to a forum should have the option to have their topics or comments viewed as an entry to at least one of the blogs that they have permission to edit.
Bloggers should have the option to have their posts viewed as a subject in at least one of the forums that they have permission to edit.
Comments to either should be visible in both forum and blog views.
Edits to one should be reflected in all views.
Adding a blog-forum link (or perhaps even a blog-blog or forum-forum link) should be supported at any time by any person with the permission to post to a view that they are linking an existing post into (assuming the author of the original post authorizes that.)
Deletions should be managed with an option to unlink the post from any of the views in which the author or moderator has permission to delete it from, and only delete the post entirely if it is unlinked from all forums and all blogs.
This is not rocket science, and it's just the beginning. There is way more than just forums and blogs that this concept supports, and I think that the results would be just as explosive. But that's the basics.

I hope you get a notification of new messages to this old thread. You can always reach me at vbulletin at nobsys dot (remove this) net.
Bill Carson