First of all, sorry if this is the wrong category!
What I have in mind is a medium.com clone using Discourse, with a custom signup flow which would create a user and an associated category, which only they could post new topics to (roughly equal to a blog). Each blogger would have their own category that only they could post in, probably with some custom frontend to order by post creation date rather than most recent post (haven’t checked that bit yet).
I’ve looked over the API and user creation looks quite simple. What I’m interested in now - before I start - is whether or not anyone thinks this is ill conceived, partly or entirely. What do people think?
Just to add to that: category specific moderation has been discussed at length and anyone not deterred by discourse not supporting this may find this plugin interesting:
I’ll have a look at the thread to do with category based moderation. It might be an issue if comments are allowed, but as I understand it I should be able to make it read-only to everyone but the assigned user unless the per-category moderation stuff is brought in.
In any case, comments/replies (which I assume people are looking at for moderation) could be done from people’s own spaces and notified through an @ or even just a link. That shifts the requirement for moderation site wide anyway, to an extent. It’s only an issue for people who want to moderate their own comments, which is admittedly a reasonable thing to want.
I’d have a custom signup form, create the user and the category through it, assign the user as the only “writer” in the category, do some other stuff to counteract spam etc, then activate the user. All looks pretty easy through the API.