What's the social impact of blogs on your forum?

[Mary303]

I'll be rolling vblog out to the paid members of my forum shortly. (Have both free and paid members.)

Just as an fyi, I plan to announce it with these notes to the members:


So what do blogs mean for Blab?
- Blogs are part of Blab the way PM’s are part of Blab – they are not part of the forums, they are an extra feature.
- Blogs are considered to be on the same standing as PM’s – a means of un-moderated private communication.
- Like PM’s they are a good way to share private information.
- Like PM’s they are not the easiest means of holding a public conversation – the forum threads are still the best means for that.

I am almost decided that unlike the forums, the blogs will not be moderated. We will consider them on the same footing as PM's and communicate that to the members. The blog owner will be responsible for content. Any complaints will be referred back to the blog owner.

Thoughts on moderating / not moderating blogs?

Anything to share regarding the impact on your forum community when you added blogs? Positives? Problems?

Did it affect the number and frequency of posts in forum threads? If so was it just an initial novelty effect, or has it been lasting?

Did it attract people to join who might not have otherwise?

Did anyone say they felt left out of blog activity?

Is there a way to restrict how many members can be invited to join blogs? That is, for all the blogs, a maximum membership of say 20. Can that be mandated through the admin panel?

Just fyi my forum www.modelhorseblab.com (http://www.modelhorseblab.com) is primarily mature adults, despite the stereotype that people interested in model horses are mentally or actually about 13 yo. ;) They approach the models much like art ... especially the very expensive sculpture castings.

thank you!

[Mary303]

Bumping this in hopes someone will respond with their experience.

There's more to forums than code, ya know? :cool: :D

[TimL]

Having it available to paid members is not going to be a good idea as getting members to use it at all is the challenge. The whole idea of Blogging is social interaction.

On my two forums...I have six bloggers. It was not worth the $60 per board I paid and vB Blog is currently lacking as a useable product ....your milage may vary.

[davide101]

I have 200+ bloggers on my forum and I consider it a success. We encourage use of the blog for journal-style postings. For example, if you want to keep track of a weekly food log, share a day-to-day experiment, or just ramble about your personal life, then use the blog. If you have something that needs feedback or would benefit others, use the forum. This has increased the average relevance of our forum threads while building an ecosystem of bloggers that enjoy sharing stories and commenting on each others' posts.

In order to make this work, it was critical to publish the latest blog headlines on every single page. We use a right column for ads and other important links, so i just put it there. Almost no one will just visit the blogs without seeing an actual headline from the forums.

[cheat-master30]

295 entries by 66 bloggers is the social impact for me, although it hasn't hurt the forum activity whatsoever (I actually have more social group popularity than blog popularity). It's been quite long lasting and slow/steady than a novelty, and most people on my forum don't even understand what a blog is, and hence the quality of many blog entries is more suited to forum topics or posts. I don't have a clue if it got any more members to join.

[Mary303]

I have 200+ bloggers on my forum and I consider it a success. We encourage use of the blog for journal-style postings. For example, if you want to keep track of a weekly food log, share a day-to-day experiment, or just ramble about your personal life, then use the blog. If you have something that needs feedback or would benefit others, use the forum. This has increased the average relevance of our forum threads while building an ecosystem of bloggers that enjoy sharing stories and commenting on each others' posts. This is the way I envisioned blogs working. A personal narrative, or sharing an ongoing experience with a limited number of invited friends seems the best usage. I think my forum is bursting with pent-up demand for exactly this. :rolleyes:



In order to make this work, it was critical to publish the latest blog headlines on every single page. We use a right column for ads and other important links, so i just put it there. Almost no one will just visit the blogs without seeing an actual headline from the forums.
Hmmm. Will have to think getting all this in place.

I'm willing to give blogs a chance to develop through bloggers inviting others to visit. If they remain slow, then the headlines are the next step.



Thanks all for your feedback! :)

Appreciate more. :D

[stonepilot]

My main forums has just started to see the blogs take off. Mostly for giving updates on projects, trips taken and other multi-post topics where the poster is front and center and the full back and forth in a forum. People seem to like it.

I would think that allowing this open to only paying members would be a roadblock for acceptance on my sites.

[petacat]

We are implementing the Blog because quite a few "diaries" were being created. These threads proved the most popular in the forums. Taking it to the next step involves granting access to the Blog as a "free" service based on participation/rank/paid subs. This should help keep the serious diarists part of our community and avoid migration to something else.

Better integration and shared services in the Blog is essential to this success.

[gazzap]

@davide101 - I presume you've used the blog_external.php feed to be able to publish the blog headlines in that way, but can you let me know exactly how you managed it? Is it a hack from vb.org?

TIA

[Tigratrus]

We did something similar using feedburner -> Buzz Boost and Universal Side Columns from vB.org, see http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showpost.php?p=1622021&postcount=503. It's a bit of a roundabout way to get the latest entries some visibility, but as mentioned by so many others, it's absolutely *critical* that forum guests *see* entries from the blogs if you want them to do anything but languish.

James and Susan

[davide101]

gazzap, I use a script called Simplepie (http://simplepie.org/) to parse and display RSS feeds throughout my site. I run a script via cron that calls Simplepie, grabs the RSS feed, parses it, outputs it however I want, and save it to a static file. I can then simply include it in the page using a plugin.