7 myths why a blog isn't needed in the discourse core

Feature
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I’ll try to dispel the myths that discourse doesn’t need a built-in blog. I believe that abandoning a blog in the core of discourse carries more negative consequences than blog in discourse. There are dozens of topics on this page where users wonder why discourse doesn’t have a built-in blog. For more than 5 years, users have been searching for blog functionality in the forum!

1. Discourse doesn’t need a blog at all.

Your competitors will be happy. Without a blog, we lose traffic and visitors. All forums have articles. Basically it’s the instructions and quick start guide. Instead of writing them as forum topics, it would be much more correct to design them in the form of a blog. The Invision Community developers were wise. They added the blog to the core and now it has become their advantage over other forums.

2. You can use wordpress or another platform. Using Discourse instead of WP comments is a good way to drive blog traffic to your forum.

Yes, but we spend our time and money installing and constantly maintaining two platforms instead of one. And this applies not only to wordpress, other platforms are even more complicated. Instead of one successful project with good SEO indicators, we get 2 projects with unpredictable indicators. Instead of one platform, users visit 2 platforms, the traffic of each platform is lower than one, the positions in search engines fall and the traffic becomes even lower. We lose traffic, not attract it. Your competitors are happy again) At the same time, we lose the ability to conduct collective blogs and other advantages, such as the use of tags, PUSH notifications. Our PWA doesn’t work for blogs! Wordpress has redundant functionality, we need a few database lines and a few MB of code. Unfortunately, wordpress is not an Easter cake from which you can cut a piece.

3. Wordpress is better for writing blogs.

Are you serious? We don’t know that yet. The developers of discourse are cool guys, they will tear up wordpress or something else with their eyes closed.

4. Blogging in the core of discourse will complicate the platform.

We live in the 21st century, everything is complicated here. The blog module is not artificial intelligence. A blog is the simplest thing you can add. But it is easier to write a whole module for integration with WordPress to pull useless ballast on the subdomain. It’s a step back. 20 years ago, such a decision would have been correct, but not now. How much will the blog module for discourse weigh? How many tables will appear in the database? I will answer: a little. I don’t expect a blog to have millions of posts. But if you have millions of posts, then I will congratulate you.

5. Forums can be flooded with spam links.

Assign trusted people, not everyone. Instead of developing the community, we need to pull the ballast in the form of an ancient blog on wordpress. We need to be distracted by blogging on our own. We lose the opportunity to use the creativity of the community to write great articles. There may be many members of the community can write free blogs better than us.

6. Discourse and blog are designed for different purposes.

The blog is needed to attract traffic. Guess what the forum needs for its development?

7. It can be much easier for users to scroll through and read only blog posts than to be distracted by all the content created by users on the forum.

In the creepy way that discourse is used as a blog engine, I agree. Many ways have been devised. It’s simple, you need a separate module with its own navigation and page. Making posts from forum topics is equivalent to making posts from chat messages. I’ll give you an example of invision community, although they have a terrible design. It is very convenient to add comments, likes, tags, a subscription to news, a link to a product from an online store, etc. to a blog post. From such posts, it would be wiser to build wiki pages. In reality, you can find more advantages, but for now, this is enough.

When choosing an engine for my community, I needed a built-in blog and I really didn’t want to look for another platform, as I liked discourse. I really hope that the developers will hear our requests and help make this wonderful platform better.

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I agree- blogs are a very useful tool to share expertise, engage members and draw in new traffic. The posts also don’t get lost in everything else as you already mentioned.

So did they do away with blogs here? I dont see any, I think it would be valuable to resurrect.

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Is Page Publishing anywhere close to what you are looking for: Page Publishing? I’m interested in using it as the end point for a collaborative writing project, but haven’t got too far with the details of that yet.

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Use news plugin

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Oh. Not to offer… content?

SEO-wise I get way more better response from Google and DuckDuckGo from WordPress than Discourse. Sure, that could be fixed but as long a blog means some layout tricks in this context.

A blog needs quite more than layout fix. Just only meta-needs are different.

BTW, Discourse works already as a blog platform. I’ve using it that way a long time now. But when, not if…, I have an article that is not tied closely to purpose of my forum it will be published via WordPress.

Comment section of blogs are perhaps the second most overrated thing in the webistan. SEO-tricks are number one. Most of blogs get never comments, neither those few would give any value.

Sure — it would expand use of Discourse. Quite many would use Discourse for everthing, but would that be a smart move? I don’t think so. It is always better to do one thing really good than everything in mediocre way.

There is only one thing missing in Discourse: working way to change look of a blog writing.

And even that is not that big question because visitors… just don’t care as long they can read that text easily and without beggins for signing up to a mail letter.

Basically you are now saying choise to do blogging is missing but for me: how is that missing?

The editor… it is so limited that I don’t want create anything else here than just pure text with few images. It works perfectly in forums (well, almost perfectly because something like 99 % of the world can’t markdown, html or bbcode but it just doesn’t matter because majority never use formatting).

You just make a demonstration how to blog using Discourse. What tools did you miss?

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For me to understand… Discourse still is (awesome) Forum Software and isn’t becoming a CMS, right?

I’m using a blog, build with hugo, cause it’s fast. Comments are possible with Discourse and automatically linked to the Forum. (Same way as Discourse is doing it with blog and meta.) So I got the best of both worlds.

Comments are rarely used, but possible. And reading the Blog in the Forum too.
And people who read a blog aren’t necessarily the same people who want to be active in the forum and vice versa.

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I’d be interested to know what your tactics are.

And generally, I’d be interested to know what a blog feature would look like. How is it different from what I have now? What does it allow? What does it forbid?

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I don’t totally understand the question — what are you meaning?

There is quite easy tactic: I write a longer post. That’s it. OP here actually wrote a blog-post (in the meaning what blog nowadays means; not only a diary, log).

Or do you mean when I’m using Discourse and when WordPress. Well… it depends. And it doesn’t come from perks or limitations of platform itself.

For me using editor of WordPress is a way much easier and streamlined than what Discourse offers. I understand totally why it is that way (article writing vs. fast living forumposts), but it affects. I can do local links much easier in WordPress. With suitable plugin using tables WordPress is superior compared to really basic manual’ish markdown what Discourse offers. In WordPress I have real media library, and Discourse is lacking it totally. Drafts… well, let’s don’t take that route at all :wink:

And still I use Discourse as a blogging platform too. But only when

  • I do more or less diary/log type writings
  • I expect conversation (where Discourse is overwhelming better than commenting of WordPress ever can be, with any solutions)
  • I need good searching and tagging (what WordPress can’t offer)

I do mainly three types of texts:

  • dog-related, and those are under WordPress because that site has really strong SEO-value
  • B2B/tech-things, and here I’m using 50/50 WordPress and Discourse and the main reason is expectations shall I get conversation or am I just delivering facts and ideas
  • hiking/paddling stories goes to Discourse, because WordPress gives zero extra value and ”risk” to get conversation is high

So, I don’t have any strategies. Well, perhaps one. If I’m trying to maximize my sharings and clicks I use WordPress every time. For some reason in my language area people aren’t too keen to click forum-links. ”Normal” sites are easier.

Why so? I don’t know. Perhaps the look of Discourse is a bit too… not messy, I don’t mean that, but perhaps slightly crowded on mobiles. In Finland desktop-selling sank some years ago and almost everyone is using mobiles. That means everything must design mobiles first and desktops comes when a developer has extra time :wink:

Or people don’t like forums because of low quality comments of tabloid publications. Or social media won this war. Or forums (all of them) gives kind of echoes from blog-hubs that everyone disliked. Or… I don’t know nothing, but perhaps forums expects commenting, but writing using mobiles is not a joy — WordPress based sites just offer reading.

Now I’m drifting away, again, but mobiles are the main reason for something I count as low quality content, like one liners, gifs etc. Somewhere those are wanted and liked, but I see it differently. And I’m not alone and when expectations are, when seen a link to a forum, that there is only a lot blinking gifs showing old jokes and twitter-style short comments… who would go there? And from other side — if/when Google sees every forums as Q/A-tech or corporal support enviroments, it will change how to show rearch results of forums. It can be not so appealing when that forum is something else than Q/A or support.

No. I don’t blame Discourse. But perhaps we should stop trying to do everything on one platform just because of administration? Perhaps we need every aspects — CMS, LMS, forums, e-commerce… — and those should served from different platforms and let designers say how all that packet looks and after that coders will do theirs magic.

But my point is that Discourse is a blogging platform like every platforms where one can create content and publish it.

Moderators — should this topic move from feature to community perhaps?

(Sorry — there must be a lot strange sentences and typos… english is quite odd language)

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That’s what I was implying in a discussion Discourse vs Invision. I used to run a blog on WordPress, and I almost hated it mostly because the engine was too overloaded with features stemming from the approach: “let’s build 1000 features, knowing that an average user will employ at most 5%, but at least we’ll be appealing to audiences that span distinct 5% partitions”.

Also,

one, okay, I, could argue that it’s precisely WordPress that ruined blogs on the internet. Within few clicks, every author has a SEO optimization plugin which tells you how you should artificially construct your blog so that it’s not too short, not too long, has at least N references to keyword and blah blah blah. And of course which adds a stupid “sign up to my unnecessary newsletter” banner.

Anyway, back to the topic. Part (or maybe that makes up 100%) of what makes Discourse great is the ability of developers to focus on what they deem essential, not trying to accustom all possible niches.

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There are certainly people already using Discourse as a blog, and more commonly as the comment engine of their blog.

To keep this on the topic of new features, what new features would Discourse need to better support blogging?

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Now there is a news plugin, it is developing well. I think it works great as a blog

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Thanks - that was interesting. As you say, one can always just write a long post, and then if it gets replies, or not, that’s very like a blog.

In what way is it not like a blog, I wonder? Well, perhaps

  • there’s no specific way to link to previous/next posts (threads) by one person
  • no specific way to see all of a person’s posts
  • no calendar view of a person’s posts
  • no person-specific tagging for their own set of posts.

But all these seem - to me - fairly small usability aspects. We do have tags, and searches, and categories. And it’s easy enough to link from one post to another.

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There’s the Portfolio feature introduced by Topic List Previews that allows you to see all Topics by a User tagged with a specific tag or within a specific Category and accessed from a button on the User Card.

So you could have a tag called blog … and rename the button “User Blog”

I seem to recall a feature having been built to cover this recently … but it’s not currently supported by TLP …

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I reckon it is mostly just layout question. Blog post styling component would keep most of users happy. But last time I checked it doesn’t use DiscoTOC — because it erases timeline. Or I remember totally wrong.

I would use docs but there is one major layout issue.

There is some meta-tricks that would tell to Google what is purpose, but I think it goes over the scope of Discourse. Again — from my point of view Discourse should stay as a damn good forum platform.

It doesn’t understand tags. It needs category. I understand totally that because its main purpose is show news, not blogs.

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That I use. All blogs are tagged blog and name-of-the-blog. It works just fine. Well… almost fine because every now and then there is needs to show in publishing date order. But that is not real question mark, more like .would be nice to have.

Portfolios… I’ve forgotten that totally. Thanks.

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