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This blog is a very unusual beast. I don’t say this to brag. It’s unusually big for a WordPress blog. (Once sites get this busy, they often move away from blogging software.) There’s an unusual level of “engagement” for a personality-driven blog. (If you’ve got a big blog based around a single person, it’s common to have the comments aimed not at the subject matter of the post itself, but at the author.) But here we’ve got long, detailed discussions between people on all sorts of topics. The comments are busy enough to be interesting but not so busy that you feel like you’re shouting into a hurricane. On top of all this, the whole thing is shockingly civil for an open-comment discussion thread where anyone can join without creating an account.
The point is: We have some sort of delicately balanced ideal here, and I’ve been slow to change things because I don’t want to disturb the mysterious alchemy we have. For years people have been asking me to create forums, and I’ve resisted because I don’t want to harm the blog or make it less fun. This blog has been a big part of my routine for 7.5 years now. It works well and I’m very reluctant to mess with it in a way that might make the thing less fun.
But Shamus, why can’t we have some optional side-forum, just for people who want to talk about other stuff?
Continue reading 〉〉 “Thinking About Forums”
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