Still, I don't think the type of blogging I do is right for the story forum. I write mostly about happenings in my day-to-day life that I deem worth sharing. ''I got a new ___ today,'' ''I like these new diapers,'' etc. isn't a story, but it's not something I'd really make a regular thread about either.
If blogs are phased out, I may well create a subforum for blog-style posts instead.
I can't see that it actually hurts anything and, I see where it may well improve the over-all interaction... and, perhaps it's an intended EC+ situation anyway... [HIGHLIGHT]perhaps we may still get something of a bit set as the former system allowed us to restrict viewing to certain levels and above... and/or limited to our friends and contacts list[/HIGHLIGHT]... Not sure how that part could work...?
That's unlikely to happen, because:
1) As a community, we want blogs to be visible - a blog seen by nobody is a useless blog.
2) The more complicated access rules we support, the more difficult it will be to get mobile options (e.g: Tapatalk) to support those controls. Blogs are already hard to access on mobile - keeping the access control rules simple will make it easier to support viewing them on mobile.
Most likely, I'll set one simple access rule that applies to all posts in the Blogs subforum, such as "only logged in members can see this".
I've noticed a number of people who usually post in the forums have opened up about their feelings about depression and suicide in the blogs. It's always worried me because the blogs aren't seen by as many people as the threads in the forums, and a cry for help runs the risk of going unheard. If the blogs were removed from the front page my fear would be that a person in need of help who, for whatever reason, feels more comfortable expressing these thoughts in a blog format, may feel no one cares enough to respond, simply because their feelings would not be in our line of sight.
This is a symptom of the wider problem that blogs are not well integrated into our current software.
Right now, we're having to use third party software just to get recent blogs on the homepage. The software should be integrated well enough that it shows that stuff natively.
When we move to our new forum platform, I'm going to be evaluating it for blog support. If the blog support is good (better than what we have now), we can keep blogs with that (better) support.
If on the other hand blogs are not supported by it, or they're supported badly (like they are now), then I'm not going to use that system - I'm probably just going to have "Blogs" be a special sub-forum.
Blogs won't be the only feature updated, streamlined or removed in the upcoming transition to new software. Every single feature of the site is going to go through this evaluation process.
I would like to keep blogs (including a list of recent blog posts on the homepage), but it does depend on what the new software supports.