Quote Originally Posted by luxlunae View Post
Will the new platform have the blogging feature?
The quick and dirty answer is... I don't know.

The longer answer is... While we're hoping to implement a better frontpage with articles and content, I don't suspect that we'll re-introduce a blog feature the same way that we have over here. Here on d-b, not only was the blog system heavily underutilized, but it was also very susceptible to spam (and still somewhat is), and because of that we had to practically lock it down and hand out permission to post, by hand, to whomever asked for it.

Knowing that, your next question might be, "So, who's going to be populating that frontpage with content if there aren't any blogs to promote to it?"

Well, we can still promote standard threads to the frontpage, so we hope to be able to fill it with that, but one thing that has been brought up, internally, is that we may create a sub-forum dedicated to creating blog-like threads, which would also include news threads. This would make it easier for people to see these threads in the standard "What's New?" list when they visit the site, as well as more easily monitor (and moderate) any discussion since it'll just be part of the standard forum.

From my perspective, there are two main reasons that fuel the choice to create a dedicated sub-forum:

First, dare I say that most people don't see the blogs posted on this site, nor do they even know that such an area exists (read: heavily underutilized), but if there was a sub-forum for blog-like posts, in plain sight, then others would definitely be interested in reading that, and might even be motivated to start their own.

Second, in the past, people have wanted to create their own threads to more-or-less track their progress as they play, but as mainly a discussion forum, there's no "on topic" area to put that. Unfortunately, as the blog area is somewhat disconnected from the main forum, I hate to shuffle people away in that direction because I know that whatever they post, over there, probably won't be seen by too many others.

So, that's why I'm leaning in the direction of a dedicated sub-forum—not to mention, everyone should be able to find things by prefix and/or username (author) a whole helluva lot easier on this new forum.

However, I'm open to feedback for anything someone may want to see on the new site.