Blogs as Channels = 100.000 channels

[alfanexus]

I am a little concerned about channels being used as blogs. Will this not give some performance issues with so many channels? If you have a medium site with about 100.000 users, then you will get a whole lot of channels, and especially now that each user can have several blogs.

I have created a test site, and moved the blog channel under forums to have both forums, groups and blogs shown in the directory on the startpage. That might not have intended that we can do this, but I makes sense to display everything on the startpage directory instead of only forum. Now each blog is displayed as a "sub-forum" under blogs (just hope each 100.000 blogs are not shown here when I upgrade to live site).

Is it really a smart move to create a channel for each blog? Please tell me that there well thought out reason for doing it this way, and not just because it was easy. Mabye it would be smarter doing each blog as a thread, since blog posts already as equal to forum posts, and blog comments are limited to the quick comments also available in forum.

I appreciate any feedback you can give on this design issue and reasoning.

[Wayne Luke]

Are all of your users going to make a Blog? They don't exist until they are created by the user. I would suspect many of your users won't create a blog. In fact most sites will probably follow a promotion scheme to limit blogs to heavy contributors and/or staff on the site.

You will break things if you move the blogs and groups under the forums channel. It isn't intended behavior at this time. In fact, I am surprised the routes work properly after moving.

[alfanexus]

About 70 percent of our users use the blog, it actually a big part of our site, with a lot of activity. They love the blogging platform in vb4 becaurse its so simple and intuitive (I have removed most of the settings), everyone can blog using this platform.

Since vbulletin is moving more in the direction of a full blown community platform instead of just a forum, I suspect more and more sites will find use for the blogs, and for some sites the blogs might be the primary part of the site not the forum.