wizgriz just because something is new or "thinking outside the box" doesn't always mean it's right.
It also doesn't mean it's wrong! ?
The point of such a 'Discussion Engine' system is not to assume what people want; not to assume that current 'best of breed', single-use systems are what everyone wants, or even the best solution that they purport to be; and certainly not to tell someone that they should go use something else, when they might not want lots of separate systems to achieve a coherent community which allows for multiple types of discussion.
wizgriz "If I want a blog I'll use a blogging platform"
You might. But there is untapped usage of blogs, here. Users on community sites mostly can't be fussed in installing a blogging system and creating their own site or wordpress.org account.
But those users are sitting there contributing to a community site, which you are suggesting should only allow them to have discussions in a medium-length (mostly), half-duplex, threaded format, where all posts are treated the same and given the same format. That's a bit specific and limiting.
A number of these users will be capable of writing blog articles, but will never write an actual 'blog'. They may already write very well thought-out posts on forums on a regular basis - which could be re-used as an article, and promoted as such.
wizgriz "So why would I ever need to create an actual blog post on my forum itself?"
If they had the opportunity to 'convert' a popular forum post of theirs into a blog article (which will just be presented a bit differently in the forum as some sort of 'premium, oooh really nice' post - but also pushed to Wordpress or similar automatically along with the comments, if you are running it) - then you have just generated a new blog post from natural activity within your forum community. What a great way to get content into your site's blog - 100% effortless.
That's a win. Off google goes indexing your blog, and attracting a whole other audience to your site, potentially converting them into forum users, too.
This is a so far untapped use case of blogs.
wizgriz If I want to engage in correspondence with other people I will use email.
The whole point of creating this debate was to recognise that the world has changed. It's not easy to tear our assumptions down, I know. We carry them around with us all the time. But let's be honest with ourselves, here.
E-mail has been largely usurped by Facebook and WhatsApp and Snapchat and stuff, certainly for non-business usage. For business use, Yammer and Slack and JIRA and Confluence are changing that, too - and for good reason.
For me, we can either accept that the world has changed, and re-assess what we are trying to achieve ('facilitate online community discussion'), or we can continue having our conversations in silos; just because the internet evolved these different discussion mechanisms at different times.
Frankly it would be amazing to me if forums still solved the problem that was originally being solved when bulletin boards were created, when people were dialling up to the internet for minutes at a time at 4800 baud.
