In fiddling with the next release of the software that powers the Phoenyx, I've been considering how to integrate blogs. A lot of us (including me, on occasion) have roleplaying blogs, and I think to a certain extent that's drawn conversation that might otherwise go in GAMERS.

(And yes, this is conversation that might otherwise go in Stakeholders, but it doesn't particularly apply to play-by-message groups, and the Fudge group is allergic to tech discussions. So I'm bouncing it off youse guys.)

So I was thinking about that, and looking at the "planets" (http://forum.phoenyx.net/planet ), and trying to figure out how to better integrate that with lists/forums, and maybe it was the pain meds talking (I had my gallbladder removed Wednesday, whee) but I decided it would be a neat idea to combine all that.

What I'm thinking is: if you've got a roleplaying blog (or a roleplaying section in a multi-topic blog) that has posts that would be appropriate to post to GAMERS, you register its feed, and when you post to your blog, the Phoenyx magically treats it as though you've posted to GAMERS as well. If you provide a comments feed, I might treat that as though the commenters have posted followups, too. (It's up to you and your software to get the GAMERS replies treated as comments on your version - the Phoenyx can provide the feed, but I don't know of any blogging software that's set up to import it. Therein lies one hurdle in my plan.)

Thoughts?

Karen Cravens (Mod) writes:

In fiddling with the next release of the software that powers the Phoenyx, I've been considering how to integrate blogs. A lot of us (including me, on occasion) have roleplaying blogs, and I think to a certain extent that's drawn conversation that might otherwise go in GAMERS.

And I guess they also draw in commentors that won't necessarily read or post to GAMERS, so it cuts both ways.

What I'm thinking is: if you've got a roleplaying blog (or a roleplaying section in a multi-topic blog) that has posts that would be appropriate to post to GAMERS, you register its feed, and when you post to your blog, the Phoenyx magically treats it as though you've posted to GAMERS as well. If you provide a comments feed, I might treat that as though the commenters have posted followups, too. (It's up to you and your software to get the GAMERS replies treated as comments on your version - the Phoenyx can provide the feed, but I don't know of any blogging software that's set up to import it. Therein lies one hurdle in my plan.)

Thoughts?

(1) Not necessarily just GAMERS - In my case I've got a specific subcategory for the Kalyr RPG playtest, which could be fed into that group rather than GAMERS.

(2) Have to think about feeding back the other way. Could possibly be done by pingbacks, which is native functionality in some blogging platforms (MT, and Wordpress, but not LJ or Blogger). My own blog uses Wordpress, and does accept pingbacks, which will then appear in the comment threads.

But I know a lot of other sites don't even if the software supports them; Pingbacks have been badly abused by comment spammers in the past, to the extent that a lot of Moveable Type users have disabled pingbacks because it wasn't worth the hassle.

-- Tim Hall http://www.kalyr.com/weblog

On Sat, 19 Apr 2008, Tim Hall wrote:

And I guess they also draw in commentors that won't necessarily read or post to GAMERS, so it cuts both ways.

True, but that's not of consequence to GAMERS. :} Unless, of course, we pull those back in somehow.

(1) Not necessarily just GAMERS - In my case I've got a specific subcategory for the Kalyr RPG playtest, which could be fed into that group rather than GAMERS.

Yes, basically any discussion group. It *could* be done with roleplaying groups, but that might be... odd.

But I know a lot of other sites don't even if the software supports them; Pingbacks have been badly abused by comment spammers in the past, to the extent that a lot of Moveable Type users have disabled pingbacks because it wasn't worth the hassle.

Yeah, that's the big thing: either direction, you're having to extend trust to a larger circle, which leads to more vulnerability.

Karen Cravens (Mod) writes:

Yeah, that's the big thing: either direction, you're having to extend trust to a larger circle, which leads to more vulnerability.

There may be some issues relating to trust which are as much social as technical; probably not such a big deal in this case, since GAMERS isn't a high traffic list, and my blog doesn't have a large community of commentors (and the obnoxious ones went away once I stopped posting about politics) Aside from the occasional one-off visitor, I think I have less than a dozen semi-regulars, including you and Carl.

-- Tim Hall http://www.kalyr.com/weblog

On 19/04/2008, Tim Hall wrote:

But I know a lot of other sites don't even if the software supports them; Pingbacks have been badly abused by comment spammers in the past, to the extent that a lot of Moveable Type users have disabled pingbacks because it wasn't worth the hassle.

Wordpress' Akismet spam filter does an excellent job of ignoring bad pingbacks and trackbacks. Also there are number of Wordpress plugins to handle this too. I rarely have a problem with bad pingbacks tbh (but comment spam is a bloom'in pain)

Mark Cunningham writes:

Wordpress' Akismet spam filter does an excellent job of ignoring bad pingbacks and trackbacks. Also there are number of Wordpress plugins to handle this too. I rarely have a problem with bad pingbacks tbh (but comment spam is a bloom'in pain)

I've found both comment spam and bad pingbacks are managable now I'm running Wordpress+Askimet, back when I was running MT2, I sometimes found myself having to delete several hundred bad pingbacks at once from a new spammer who wasn't in my blacklist. But I also had problems with crapflooders (large numbers of gibberish posts containing URLs of major news sites or seatch engines, whose main purpose was to overwhelm blacklists.

But there has been at least one major upgrade to MT since I switched, so MT sites may well no longer have the sort of problems I had.

-- Tim Hall http://www.kalyr.com/weblog

Tim Hall wrote:

(2) Have to think about feeding back the other way. Could possibly be done by pingbacks, which is native functionality in some blogging platforms (MT, and Wordpress, but not LJ or Blogger). My own blog uses Wordpress, and does accept pingbacks, which will then appear in the comment threads.

I'd be reluctant to build a new technology mashup based on a technology that already has trouble combating spam.

I think blogs are an odd critter, and I find myself wondering why we have them... and specifically why _I_ have, at any given time, two or three active ones. And what's funny is that it doesn't always matter if anybody reads them... it seems that I talk to record and work through my thoughts as much as anything, and whether others find them worth reading seems to be secondary.

But there's another side to it... sometimes, I don't want to have a conversation among equals, but I want to make statements where I'm the center of attention. (There's the #1 reason for most blogs, I think.) I don't want someone hauling the discussion off in a direction that has little to do with my intended topic. Often, I want to know that people are reading, but I don't want them to offer advice (though they do anyway, even when I tell them not to), or even get into a debate.

In short, I have thoughts about certain things, but _I don't have time_ to discuss them with a crowd of people.

So I find this idea of Karen's kind of odd... if I want to participate in a forum (that is, a discussion group, whether it be a web-forum, mailing list, or Usenet), I don't make blog posts, I make forum posts. Granted, there are times that I cross-post from my blog to GAMERS or the Fudge List, but they aren't often. (And I'll give you this... if GAMERS were a healthy, active list, I might not have a roleplaying blog, but GAMERS has lived past its prime.) Hm... here's an important distinction. I'm not looking to create a "community" around my blog, but I think forums should and (if successful as a forum) inevitably do form communities.

The place where I see blogs and forums intersecting isn't at the same level as Karen does... she wants to maintain the integrity of the individual's blog, and I don't really care about that, on the assumption that if you have a blog, it's because you don't want a forum.

(But on the flip-side, a lot of indie gamers view their blogs as platforms from which they talk to each other. I think that view is possibly broken, because it requires you to have a blog to be part of the conversation, and it doesn't build a coherent community... if I read blog A and not B, I don't get the whole picture when A and B are arguing with about other. And that word "about" is chosen deliberately, because they often aren't talking _to_ each other. It has its benefits... the posts tend to be more coherent essays instead of one-liners, and I think they are less prone to lose track of the main point. But that may be a function of the quality of the posters more than the format.)

So I guess the thing I'm struggling with in Karen's idea is, I don't see the benefit. When I blog, I assume I'm addressing a group of people who are specifically interested in what I have to say. When I post to a forum, that's slightly different... I don't write in my blog the way I'd write on RPG.net. Readers who don't like what I say on my blog can stop reading what I write, but readers on a forum who don't like what I say have to put up with me or leave a community. I'm sure there are those who don't write differently in both cases, but those tend to be the kinds of writers that make me want to leave a community.

I think mashing up blogs and forums confuses personal soap box with community discussion, and I'm not convinced that's a good thing.

Is there a way to unsubscribe from this mail list? If so, can you please remove me?

----- Original Message ----- From: "Carl D Cravens (Mod)" To: Sent: Monday, April 21, 2008 2:25 PM Subject: Re: GAMERS: Blogging GAMERS

Tim Hall wrote:

(2) Have to think about feeding back the other way. Could possibly be done by pingbacks, which is native functionality in some blogging platforms (MT, and Wordpress, but not LJ or Blogger). My own blog uses Wordpress, and does accept pingbacks, which will then appear in the comment threads.

I'd be reluctant to build a new technology mashup based on a technology that already has trouble combating spam.

I think blogs are an odd critter, and I find myself wondering why we have them... and specifically why _I_ have, at any given time, two or three active ones. And what's funny is that it doesn't always matter if anybody reads them... it seems that I talk to record and work through my thoughts as much as anything, and whether others find them worth reading seems to be secondary.

But there's another side to it... sometimes, I don't want to have a conversation among equals, but I want to make statements where I'm the center of attention. (There's the #1 reason for most blogs, I think.) I don't want someone hauling the discussion off in a direction that has little to do with my intended topic. Often, I want to know that people are reading, but I don't want them to offer advice (though they do anyway, even when I tell them not to), or even get into a debate.

In short, I have thoughts about certain things, but _I don't have time_ to discuss them with a crowd of people.

So I find this idea of Karen's kind of odd... if I want to participate in a forum (that is, a discussion group, whether it be a web-forum, mailing list, or Usenet), I don't make blog posts, I make forum posts. Granted, there are times that I cross-post from my blog to GAMERS or the Fudge List, but they aren't often. (And I'll give you this... if GAMERS were a healthy, active list, I might not have a roleplaying blog, but GAMERS has lived past its prime.) Hm... here's an important distinction. I'm not looking to create a "community" around my blog, but I think forums should and (if successful as a forum) inevitably do form communities.

The place where I see blogs and forums intersecting isn't at the same level as Karen does... she wants to maintain the integrity of the individual's blog, and I don't really care about that, on the assumption that if you have a blog, it's because you don't want a forum.

(But on the flip-side, a lot of indie gamers view their blogs as platforms from which they talk to each other. I think that view is possibly broken, because it requires you to have a blog to be part of the conversation, and it doesn't build a coherent community... if I read blog A and not B, I don't get the whole picture when A and B are arguing with about other. And that word "about" is chosen deliberately, because they often aren't talking _to_ each other. It has its benefits... the posts tend to be more coherent essays instead of one-liners, and I think they are less prone to lose track of the main point. But that may be a function of the quality of the posters more than the format.)

So I guess the thing I'm struggling with in Karen's idea is, I don't see the benefit. When I blog, I assume I'm addressing a group of people who are specifically interested in what I have to say. When I post to a forum, that's slightly different... I don't write in my blog the way I'd write on RPG.net. Readers who don't like what I say on my blog can stop reading what I write, but readers on a forum who don't like what I say have to put up with me or leave a community. I'm sure there are those who don't write differently in both cases, but those tend to be the kinds of writers that make me want to leave a community.

I think mashing up blogs and forums confuses personal soap box with community discussion, and I'm not convinced that's a good thing.

--

Carl D Cravens (raven@phoenyx.net) Talk is cheap because supply inevitably exceeds demand.

On Mon, 21 Apr 2008, Mike Poznanski wrote:

Is there a way to unsubscribe from this mail list? If so, can you please remove me?

If you look in the headers, the Phoenyx uses standard mailing-list headers (ideally, your mail client should recognize them, but I guess yours doesn't). One of them looks like this:

List-Unsubscribe:

If you send (any) email to that address, it will unsubscribe you.

On Mon, 21 Apr 2008, Carl D Cravens (Mod) wrote:

The place where I see blogs and forums intersecting isn't at the same level as Karen does... she wants to maintain the integrity of the individual's blog, and I don't really care about that, on the assumption that if you have a blog, it's because you don't want a forum.

I see the intersection being more like this:

Tim has a blog. He doesn't discuss just gaming there. That's where you go if you want to read "stuff by Tim."

GAMERS is a group. Other people besides Tim start threads there. That's where you go if you want to read "stuff about roleplaying." (In theory, anyhow...)

Carl D Cravens (Mod) writes:

I think mashing up blogs and forums confuses personal soap box with community discussion, and I'm not convinced that's a good thing.

OK, so I'm probably guilty of thinking "hey, that's a nifty idea, how do we build it" without pausing at "Exactly why do we need this"; guess this is because I've been trained as a systems analyst rather than a business analyst.

OTOH, we talk about 'community', but what do we mean by this? I'm in a great many overlapping communities (and I'm increasingly finding online communities overlapping with real-world ones as well). There are a few blogs that have become communities in their own right (Patrick and Teresa Nielsen-Hayden's Making Light is an obvious one).

While I can see your distinction between the sorts of thing you post on a blog, and the sorts of things that are discussion-starters on fora, I can see a lot of overlap, which is why I frequently do crosspost.

I think there's less merit in trying to merge any followup discussions; it might be that piping category-level RSS feeds to specified fora is as much as is really worth doing.

-- Tim Hall http://www.kalyr.com/weblog

On Mon, 21 Apr 2008, Tim Hall wrote:

OK, so I'm probably guilty of thinking "hey, that's a nifty idea, how do we build it" without pausing at "Exactly why do we need this"; guess this is because I've been trained as a systems analyst rather than a business analyst.

Yes, I probably shouldn't have even brought up the spam issue... the technical stuff, I can solve.

I think there's less merit in trying to merge any followup discussions; it might be that piping category-level RSS feeds to specified fora is as much as is really worth doing.

The important part, for community-building, is to see that commenters have a means of finding replies to their comments. (Hit-and-run commenting is a whole 'nother anticommunity issue, though, which is slowly being solved by tech. Or rather, re-solved. But that's a whole 'nother rant.)

On 21/04/2008, Carl D Cravens (Mod) wrote:

I'd be reluctant to build a new technology mashup based on a technology that already has trouble combating spam.

No offense, but that's a silly reason to not do it. I don't see why spam has entered the equation here at all. Blogs get spam via comments and trackbacks. This has nothing to do with importing posts from *member's* blogs and providing/sending a link back to the original blog. I can't see any way that you're opening up the mailing list to spam, unless I'm missing something? Are you saying that the mailing list will introduce spam to people's blogs and that's why we shouldn't do it?

(But on the flip-side, a lot of indie gamers view their blogs as platforms from which they talk to each other. I think that view is possibly broken, because it requires you to have a blog to be part of the conversation, and it doesn't build a coherent community...

If people view their blogs as "platforms from which they talk to each other" then does it matter what you or I actually think it should be? People are doing it. And do you need a coherent community for blogging? Planets/Feed aggravates, Blogrolls, trackbacks/pings, etc. all these technologies alow "conversations" to flow. Often people will pull a conversation into actual forums. Certainly it's happened to me on one or two topics. (Last year's exchanges about the death of fudge are prime example... that whole discussion occured *because* I blogged about it rather than posted in a forum)

I always viewed blogs as being a sort of "distributed" forum. The Vanilla forum software comes to mind because it feels more like a community blogging than forum. I've turned a blogging software into a full realised forum, because the technology is the same. Call it what you will, a forum post or a blog post... at the end of the day, it's content that can make up a part of a conversation. And once it's on the internet, you don't really have control over where it will go.

I think mashing up blogs and forums confuses personal soap box with community discussion, and I'm not convinced that's a good thing.

Hey, this is the internet. It's everyone's personal soap box! Just look at what we're saying in this thread. I mean, who am I, to say that blogging is the same as forum? :) Besides, if it generates discussion and creates "community" then why *not* do it?

In a sense, what Karen is suggesting, is sort of already happening. The Fudge planet feed, people use it to see what people are talking about and then if they see something they find interesting, they'll comment on that blog. The difference here is the conversation occurs on the mailing list rather than on other people's blogs where it might not be seen by the rest of the members.

I do think though you need to get a good sense if people want it or not though, just turning it on in an existing mailing list where only two people want it and one doesn't, may not work.

On Tue, 22 Apr 2008, Mark Cunningham wrote:

I don't see why spam has entered the equation here at all.

My bad, I mentioned it in passing.

Are you saying that the mailing list will introduce spam to people's blogs and that's why we shouldn't do it?

It's a consideration, from a technical standpoint: because spammers are looking for exploits, and so when putting the thing together you have to consider how a spammer might game the system.

on one or two topics. (Last year's exchanges about the death of fudge are prime example... that whole discussion occured *because* I blogged about it rather than posted in a forum)

Well, kind of. There *was* the business about the planetary redirect. ("FOUR USERS!")

I always viewed blogs as being a sort of "distributed" forum. The Vanilla forum software comes to mind because it feels more like a community blogging than forum. I've turned a blogging software into a full realised forum, because the technology is the same. Call it what you will, a forum post or a blog post... at the end of the day, it's content that can make up a part of a conversation. And once it's on the internet, you don't really have control over where it will go.

Yep. You have a thread starter, and you have a reply/comment. A blog is just restrictions on who can start threads, and a particular display template, is all. From a technical standpoint, anyway. Socially, that's something else - hosting and control has a big impact, which is part of why I'm considering it.

In a sense, what Karen is suggesting, is sort of already happening. The Fudge planet feed, people use it to see what people are talking about and then if they see something they find interesting, they'll comment on that blog. The difference here is the conversation occurs on the mailing list rather than on other people's blogs where it might not be seen by the rest of the members.

The notion kind of grew out of trying to figure out how to make the Fudge Firehose ("Planet Fudge" is dead, long live the Fudge Firehose) more useful to the Fudge List.

And how to revive GAMERS, too... (hello? Anyone out there actually roleplaying these days?)

I do think though you need to get a good sense if people want it or not though, just turning it on in an existing mailing list where only two people want it and one doesn't, may not work.

I turned it on in the dev site, and I actually could turn it on and no one would *notice*... so I'm using my LJ as a posting client, who's to know? (Other than the people who have me friended over there, anyway.) Come to that, you could probably do something bizarro with Feedburner or another feed-to-mail thing, and manage to post to mailing lists with a blog without the mailing list having to do anything special. But I digress.

I'm also assuming, of course, that only the blog authors are responsible for directing their stuff into GAMERS, which is pretty much how it needs to be ("claiming" blogs is a solved problem). I don't foresee anything good of coming from directing the Fudge Firehose into the Fudge List, for instance.

On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 09:59:36PM +0000, Karen Cravens (Mod) wrote:

And how to revive GAMERS, too... (hello? Anyone out there actually roleplaying these days?)

Well, yeah...

Currently running an old-school dungeon-bash campaign, and playing a version of the Laundry (Charlie Stross' setting for _The Atrocity Archive_ and _The Jennifer Morgue_). Running intermittently (once a month or so) a World War II campaign with magic. Working on a translation of 2300AD to GURPS 4th, which is the rule system in use for all these games.

On Tue, 22 Apr 2008, Roger Burton West wrote:

Well, yeah...

I'm not, sadly. I'm going to start Gavilan up soon as the software's in usable shape (I've been doodling in the wiki, in the meantime), but that's a little while out yet.

And I'm hoping Big Damn Heroes will start up someday. I have a character, 'round here somewhere.

Karen Cravens (Mod) writes:

I'm not, sadly. I'm going to start Gavilan up soon as the software's in usable shape (I've been doodling in the wiki, in the meantime), but that's a little while out yet.

I'd forgotten than one - I have a character in that, don't I?

I'm still GMing Kalyr on the Dreamlyrics.com messageboards, using the actual play as part of the ongoing playtest.

Haven't had any Face-to-Face play since Stabcon in January, because the annual Dreamlyrics gathering has been put back from Easter to late August. I'll be at Stabcon in July (where no doubt I'll meet Roger Burton West again), but may well miss Friday due to a clash with a prog-rock gig (Spock's Beard)

-- Tim Hall http://www.kalyr.com/weblog

On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 05:54:57PM +0000, Tim Hall wrote:

I'll be at Stabcon in July (where no doubt I'll meet Roger Burton West again),

I certainly plan to be there...

On 22/04/2008, Karen Cravens (Mod) wrote:

I'm also assuming, of course, that only the blog authors are responsible for directing their stuff into GAMERS, which is pretty much how it needs to be ("claiming" blogs is a solved problem). I don't foresee anything good of coming from directing the Fudge Firehose into the Fudge List, for instance.

It might be worth suggesting it on the FudgeList and seeing what people think, if they care at all.

Mark Cunningham wrote:

It might be worth suggesting it on the FudgeList and seeing what people think, if they care at all.

I'd really rather not start a meta-topic discussion when there's no other discussion going on. It reinforces the (mostly wrong) idea that all the discussion is about non-Fudge stuff.

On Wed, 23 Apr 2008, Mark Cunningham wrote:

It might be worth suggesting it on the FudgeList and seeing what people think, if they care at all.

Nah, because first that would require fixing it, and I'd rather work on the next release of the actual software, so we can maybe make it to v1.0 before the next YAPC.

It's been shut off for two weeks... I was testing the dev version and had some permissions issues (it's ALWAYS a permissions issue) and didn't notice. Now that I did, I'm waiting to see if anyone else does.

Mark Cunningham wrote:

No offense, but that's a silly reason to not do it.

I didn't say not to do it. I said that I'd be reluctant to do it using a technology that already has trouble combating spam. Trackbacks don't have a trust mechanism built in.

I'm not concerned about spam getting into the mailing lists, just with working around the brute-force and often ineffective methods of spam prevention in trackback systems.

Building a new protocol would mean gaining support, but trackbacks aren't supported by some of the biggest players either.

That's probably the biggest obstacle to this idea... even if I want to participate, I'm not going to be able to until I figure out how to incorporate it into Blosxom and Pollxn.

If people view their blogs as "platforms from which they talk to each other" then does it matter what you or I actually think it should be?

Nope. But then I never said what blogs _should be_. I'm just musing on what they _are_ and how people use them.

People are doing it. And do you need a coherent community for blogging? Planets/Feed aggravates, Blogrolls, trackbacks/pings, etc. all these technologies alow "conversations" to flow.

I don't think they allow conversations to flow... I think they allow fragments of conversations to reach a fraction of the people involved in them.

When you sign up for a mailing list, or read a (well-designed) web forum regularly, you get messages 1, 2, 3, 4 and so on. When you participate in the "cloud" of blogs, you get message 2, 7, 8, 3, and 19. It's a "conversation" in which all the participants can't hear, even if they wanted to, everything all the other participants say, because it's too hard to follow it all. There are people in the conversation that other people in the conversation don't even realize are talking.

The number one place I experience this is in blog comments, where the third person to comment on a blog posts sees what persons one and two had to say, but very often will never see what persons four and five have to say... even when four and five _directly address_ person three.

Blogs are rather messed up when it comes to having a conversation.

I think blogs work well when I have something to say, and readers of what I have to say want to say something _to me_ about it. But I think their ability for community and conversation degrade rapidly outside of that.

I don't see pushing blog entries and comments into another forum as a solution for this problem... it may carry the conversation to another segment of the population, but it doesn't help those who aren't reading that forum.

Often people will pull a conversation into actual forums.

Of course... and I'm leaning toward thinking that doing so should be a deliberate decision on a per-post basis, and not an automatic importing of every RPG related post.

I think that's where I'm not seeing the benefit, in the automation, and especially the usefulness compared to the time spent programming and maintaining it.

I always viewed blogs as being a sort of "distributed" forum. The Vanilla forum software comes to mind because it feels more like a community blogging than forum.

Only because Vanilla, like blog software, really lacks a lot of the features that proper forum software ought to have.

But the one place I participate in a Vanilla forum, it just feels like a bare-bones forum to me... I don't get a "community blog" feel from it.

I've turned a blogging software into a full realised forum, because the technology is the same. Call it what you will, a forum post or a blog post... at the end of the day, it's content that can make up a part of a conversation.

The issue isn't content, it's convenience of accessibility to the content in a way that improves the conversation. Or more specifically, will Karen's idea improve the conversation through added convenience? (And is it really added convenience or not?)

I think mashing up blogs and forums confuses personal soap box with community discussion, and I'm not convinced that's a good thing.

Hey, this is the internet. It's everyone's personal soap box! Just look at what we're saying in this thread. I mean, who am I, to say that blogging is the same as forum? :)

My blog as personal soap box is not the same as this forum as personal soap box. Yes, we all give personal opinions in both, but one can assume that on your blog, you're the center of attention. In a forum, when you try to be the constant center of attention, you can disrupt community.

When I write something for my blog and then cross-post it to a forum, I always end up rewriting portions of it for the forum. Because the way I write in my blog is not always appropriate for how one should write in a forum.

But then, I'm also of a mind that three-quarters of what gets posted to forums should have been deleted before being sent. Forums are too often dominated by people with a tendency to post without substantial thought.

Here's another issue... I don't want someone posting thread-starters to a forum and then walking away from them and not participating in the discussion. But this feature could certainly lead to that when a hooked-in blogger doesn't really participate in the forum.

I think forum posts ought to come from someone who has real buy-in on the forum and not just a loose relationship.

That may be social... but then you have the overhead of vetting blogs, monitoring blogs whose bloggers _used_ to be part of the forum but really aren't any more, etc.

Besides, if it generates discussion and creates "community" then why *not* do it?

Generating discussion isn't equal to creating community. Discussions can destroy or fragment community. "Discussion" in itself is not a goal of mine. A fruitful sharing of ideas is my goal, and I'm not seeing the fruitfulness of this idea.

I'm not saying that it can't be fruitful, I'm just saying I don't see it.

On 19/04/2008, Tim Hall wrote:

(2) Have to think about feeding back the other way. Could possibly be done by pingbacks, which is native functionality in some blogging platforms (MT, and Wordpress, but not LJ or Blogger). My own blog uses Wordpress, and does accept pingbacks, which will then appear in the comment threads.

If you could send a trackback or pingback to the blog entry when someone *replies* to one of their imported posts for the first time, that would be the best.

Also, if it was possible to provide an RSS feed of just the replies on GAMERS to the post, then you can do lots of funky stuff with it. Certainly I could write a plugin for Wordpress that could automatically pull in such an RSS feed (if it existed or was passed to the blog via a trackback) and add them as comments or more simply use a sidebar widget that displays the RSS feed. I don't know if would make sense to do it the other way though... Wordpress provides an RSS feed of comments on a post...

Mark