I can only speak for myself of course, but I run an automotive discussion forum and use subscriptions to provide different "benefits" for my users. Since most of my users are car enthusiasts, I offer blogs for a certain level of membership (Gold) so they can chronicle their car-related activities, for example). The blogs allow my members an easy way to have their own web space on my site and they are very popular. The problem is, I have to use a third party blog software. For me, it would be far better to have an integrated blog capability that has the look and feel of the rest of my forum.

My 2 cents.

I vote for Blogs first because - it is something I have wanted for a long time! Currently, I use a third party blog software for my member's blogs, but I would much prefer (and so would my users) a blog system that is part of the UBB system and that has the same look and feel of the rest of the forum. I suppose the need for blogs depends on the type of community you have. My members are British car enthusiasts and would like to have a way to show off and chronicle their restorations, racing exploits, etc, as part of the overall threads community.

Thanks Basil for your perspective on the blog feature.

Like I said in my post, I just couldn't wrap my head around how they would be used in a forum system.

Now I can see where a expanded user profile in a "miniblog" form could be a useful thing to build interest in the community members, and by extension the community itself.

I never said they were a bad idea. Although from a development perspective if revamping the UI helped ease the integration of features such as, blogs, classified ads and whatever else Rick may have in mind, I think it makes sense from a project/resource efficiency perspective to lay the groundwork first.

Which ever gets done first is fine by me!

BTW, someone mentioned a WP plugin; have you actually went and looked at WPMU? It's dirty, hard to work with, and worse of all, it forces you to use the "anti www initiative" with no way to disable it short of diving into code... So consider my vote a huge "no way" on that route...

Blogs First!

I did vote for Blogs Before the Topic increased in size.
Its a Tough one.

Ive gone for Blogs for the simple reason its been on the "Road Map" for so long. Ive posted its coming for god knows how long.

But what puts a downer on it for me, its that the "New"
features always seem to come on line in there "Basic" form.
And its a for ever wait for it to get to a "Normal" Level.

IMO there is still work to be done on the structure its self
before any more new features need fixing.
7.4.1 has come out and there are Bugs out the Box so to speak,
I would love to see a STABLE release we can have confidence in.
I did have confidence back in 7.2.2 but the permissions i knew was a hell of a job, and it seems to be done and working fine.

I want to see the ability to store Gallery Pictures to a
directory of my choice like the upload files.
I currently have via upload files 7,000 images.
With the Gallery possibly 2,000 and there all being saved to
the Root of my Forums. Which are mx 2mb each.
Ive no way to archive or manage the Gallery Files.

I have space to play with but does everyone have that luxury?
And while your there lest get them watermarked as there nicking our bandwidth so we may as well stamp on the images where there coming from

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Its a great product rick but the upgrades just are not exciting anymore. I think of it from the user not the Admin side of it.

I read a web survey recently and it pointed out that many members of a online forum will leave if its too difficult or complicated to understand. I think were at that level now.
Were not the easiest forum to get to grips with.
Yes if you stick at it, but it can be difficult for new members.

Great work Rick.
Its all feedback as long as we can move forward with new features more frequently with less bugs you will keep most of us happy

I agree Mark. I'm a very technical type dude. I'm like Scotty on the original Star Trek. I would rather read a technical manual over watch TV, LOL.

This is getting very complicated to use for this software.

I have to agree with that statement.

There are so many products coming out now that are clones of the MySpace, FaceBook, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, MyBlogLog, and other very popular user community destinations, that mimic the look and feel of those apps and are written in PHP. Most of them now include the feature of allowing a user to manage a web page of some sort, and have limited control over it, and blog with it, and upload multimedia, control a contact or 'buddy' list, etc. Many of these products includes availability of the Single Sign-Ons (e.g. OpenID) that permits users registered on a large service provider such as Yahoo to have instant registered access to your site. The ability to change not only the colors and background images of a style, but the entire layout as well, with just one click. The ability to have "plug-ins" of all sorts, such as a product like Moodle, for instance.

All of THAT would be "exciting".

Users want more now that they are accustomed to the features on MySpace and FaceBook. They've been trained to think that it's normal to have such features available on a website, and when they come across sites that don't offer them, those sites look primitive. Old-fashioned. Out of touch.

I know the UI is important. But monetizing our sites, and drawing traffic to them is pretty important too. Why should you add Blogs now? Because you've been promising to do it for a very long time, and there's no compelling reason not to keep your promise.

The broad availability of many, many white-label user community products with forums, chats, blogs, photo and video upload galleries, interactive games that keep score, etc has made me think seriously about moving my community over to one of them, just to thrill and excite my existing user base, and to attract a crowd of new users used to "tags", and "tweets", and automatically getting free widgets when they join a user community. The only thing that's held me back, really, is the backlog of 10 years worth of posts, all indexed in search engines, that can't be imported to any new software.

I know you make a solid product, and kudos to you for the care you take to produce a stable, bug-free piece of code. But please, please, can't you take a look around at, if not the wave of the future, at least the splash of the present, and help us webmasters give users what they want?

For me, it's all about retaining memebrs and attracting new ones. And it's getting harder and harder to do withoutsoftware that's getting to be considered "standard".

I know coding is painful and difficult. I know things have to come one baby step at a time. But starting by adding blogs as a feature would be a little thing we could throw to users who are increasingly distracted by larger community sites with nicer features.

Thanks.

I agree completely! One consistent complaint I've had over the years is from the members, who just want to discuss cars; often times they have difficulty navigating and grasping the vast array of "features." I have found more than one occassion where I installed a new version with new bells and whistles and found that my members were not nearly as enthralled with the new features as I was. Threads is a great piece of forum software (the best), but the sad truth is, in its current form, much is lost on the average member (at least on my site). It seems there has been a lot of focus on stuff that the true forum-geeks, like us, appreciate, but not necessarily the average user.

I'm not proposing that any features be eliminated, but when the new UI is developed, I would suggest that the primary focus should be on making the forum less cluttered and easier to navigate/understand. As it happens, I am an analyst who conducts Operational Testing of complex (mostly military) systems, and I can tell you that the #1 thing that gets looked at in any Operational Test is the man-machine interface. The simpler and cleaner you can make it, the better.

Just 2 more cents.

I'm with you both. I to would like to compete with the "Big Boys" by having my communities giving things that the big guys give included. I have not only my time but a good deal of money invested in my communities not only with the software but also equipment to be able to be self efficient and totally in house from the site to all the equipment that makes it possible.

Some of you have seen my photo in the gallery of some of my equipment and not trying to brag or anything but I have been working on having everything self efficient for some time. Recently this year I took the plunge and built my rack and added a few nice toys as well. Took the time to make it not only functional but eye pleasant as well just in case the buddies happen to stumble into the server room.

Besides, you wouldn't believe how many women tell me I have a nice rack, lol.

I want all the nice things that those big corporations have for my communities. I like to play around building better servers and running great software on them. I love the UBB product as I have been with it since 1998 and now have 3 runtime licenses for the product. In the future I hope to have many more and more communities going and be very popular too.

hmmm... blogs moved into the lead.