Would you use a Blog section? (Where you can post blog posts directly on the forum)

[AstonJ]

@derek-zhou

Forums are for short form writings

Every forum is different

I’ve managed forums which have grown into fully fledged sites, with News, Articles and Blog sections - and all with forums using the same forum platform to power all those sections (you just give the first post (i.e the news, article, or blog) a different design to subsequent posts (i.e the comments).

@derek-zhou

A long form writing (not AI slop) takes much more time and effort; So if I spent a considerable amount of time to write a blog post, I would want a permanent URL, not subject to the whims of moderators.

Whenever you post on a platform you do not own you are subject to that platform’s community guidelines. If you do not want to be subject to them then it’s best to create/post on your own blog that you host on your own server (but even then, you are subject to the datacenter’s terms, often based on the laws of countries in which they are physically located).

@derek-zhou

Posting long form writings directly on a forum will put more burden on the moderators (see the additional rules you have)..

That is true… but there are swings and roundabouts. We recently had a thread that would have been a good candidate for such a section - as it was a ‘forum discussion’ it received replies that it might not have were it a ‘personal blog’.

Additionally, people are already posting blog-like threads on the forum. Here are a couple of recent threads from just the last few days:

• Elixir is the productivity language of the Agentic era
• I built Alpen Planner - a weekly planner built w/ LiveView

@christhekeele

I’d argue that “I don’t like the idea and think it would be a net detriment to the forum” should be an option alongside “dislike wouldn’t personally use”, otherwise it feels like a forgone conclusion (note neither of these are views I hold).

At this stage we’re more interested in whether anyone would use it. Negatives (esp on a per user basis) can often be worked around, for instance, the blogger or the entire section could be muted. The main potential negatives to the forum are listed in the “not-to-do” list in the first post - was there anything else you can think of that might be a detriment to the forum?

@christhekeele

Would such a publishing platform be able to take advantage of Markdown headers to produce a proper ToC? If not, I probably wouldn’t use it as I do view that as table stakes for any long-form content I personally author.

You can create anchors with headings, eg:

This should become a linkable heading

Which you can then add towards the top of the post. Discourse actually does have a ToC feature which I think might be via a plugin, you can see an example here: https://meta.discourse.org/t/creating-form-templates/397564 (I’m not sure we’d need it tho as a list could be created manually as per above)