journal == blog?

[Adamus]

Just been using a journal thread for the last month and have a few bits of feedback to brighten your afternoon

Seems I'm using journals here on T2W exactly as I use blogs out there on the web.

T2W gives you only about 10% of the functionality of a real blog though, so here's a list of what I think would improve T2W journals - apart from the quality of the content of course :innocent:

- the latest post should be the first displayed

- the latest post's contents should be what appears in the little mouse-overs on the forum thread list

- replies to the journal by the non-authors should appear as comments on the particular post in a mini-thread

That should keep your programmers busy for a while

By the way, we need more emoticons. I definitely would use ones like :stupid: :unlucky: :introspective: :magic: :shrug:

 

[Sharky]

Hi Adamus,

We actually did have a full blown blogging section of the site (as well as the Journals forum) for quite some time. The main problem we found was that because it wasn't well integrated into the forums, and stood alone as a separate section, it just wasn't getting enough eyeballs looking at it, so those that did keep blogs lost interest in updating them, because there were so few commenting on them.

The Journals forum does have a special Thread Privacy control on it, so that you can control who can post to your thread, but apart from that it acts just like any other thread. I don't think we'd want to go back to the old Blog system any time soon, not without finding a better way to integrate into the forums, like we've done with comments on Articles, posting to the forums.

As for emoticons, if you go advanced when posting a reply and click more next to the smilies you'll see some additional ones. I think there are enough there to express yourself with it, if we added a lot more then they could start to become a bit distracting - hopefully we've got the right balance.

Thanks for your feedback! Always appreciated

 

[Adamus]

Hi Sharky,
I agree with you about too many emoticons, but perhaps just one or two more, especially the ones I suggested :jester:

re blogging: I also think you're right about full-blown blogging. But using the journals both as an author and a reader leaves me a bit cold. I think you could do a lot more with journals, to give them more of a blog style. If it was down to me to say what would be good, I would:

(a) offer the option to thread the journal 'blog-style' - i.e. latest entry first

(b) offer another option to display only the latest entry with a list of earlier entry titles below or beside

(c) make reader's comments on the journal into sub-threads beneath the author's entry that they reply to

I'm a programmer myself so I know that might be a huge ask, but if you don't ask, you don't get

 

[Sharky]

Okay, re. the smilies leave it with me I'll see what we can do.

Some interesting suggestions. As you guessed it would require quite a bit of custom programming to put into effect. So perhaps best if we make a note of the suggestions for now, and when we next review the journal's section, consider whether these are worth pursuing further. But certainly thanks for the feedback.