Power to the blogger!
Feature ideas to help bloggers
JoeUser Forums
Anyone who's written enough on-line over a long enough period of time knows that there are a lot of people out there who write before they think.
This is particularly true on Blog Sites. My favorite blog, USS Clueless, doesn't allow any comments on his articles. He used to have a message board but eventually he grew weary of the idiocy there and disbanded that too. We have some advantages in that our IT staff can put together some interesting options for bloggers.
Ultimately, JoeUser is a blog site, not a discussion site. How much discussion occurs on blogs will be up to the author of a given article on their blog. If a blogger doesn't want "l33tdue89" to respond on his or her blog, then he shouldn't be allowed to respond. Period.
But why stop there? What I am interested in setting up is a system in which bloggers can have control over not just who can respond on their blogs but what kinds of users can respond on their blog. Here are some ideas that we have.
Basic Filtering
When you write an article not only can you control the audience of who can read it at all (that's already in) but you can control who can comment it. Your options will be:
Who can comment on your article?
( ) Everyone (default)
( ) Registered Users Only
( ) No one
( ) Custom
If you select Custom things get even more interesting. You could then filter out people based on anything you want. Let me be up front: Bloggers would have the right to discriminate who gets to comment on their blog. I personally would probably not use these features but that freedom should be provided to the bloggers themselves to decide.
For instance:
No one over age X can comment on my blog
No one under age Y can comment on my blog
No one with access less than Z can comment on my blog (in the next few weeks we'll be adding new access groups where trusted regulars will slowly move up in access).
We could even have a generic JoeUser knowledge test where users would take a test on knowledge on various issues. Bloggers could have a score threshold needed to comment on their blog. Most people wouldn't take the test but that would be fine with bloggers who used this option since they would be ones looking for only those who are interested in serious, intelligent, discussion.
Some people would likely be up in arms about these kinds of options. But the fact is, this site exists for people to be able to write blogs. It's a blog site. The features are aimed at encouraging people to write. To be comfortable writing about what they want. And to that end we want to provide them with features necessary to have some control over who comments on their blog.
