Personal blogs for individual members
I'm exploring the possibility of using Groupsite as a replacement for an ageing phpBB system that is currently used by a UK membership organisation.
One of the key components of the current system are "diaries" that individual members maintain. These are currently implemented as discussion threads that are created by individual users. Diary owners post their own entries within the thread, and anyone can respond to their entries. This gets very unwieldy, and diaries commonly run to hundreds of posts and scores of pages, within the owners' entries and everyone's responses intermixed.
A blog format would clearly be a better way to structure this kind of information. Within groupsite, however, it seems that blogs are associated either with groups or subgroups. Is there any way to enable a blog within each member profile?
Also, just to complicate things, visibility of the blog would need to be limited to a specific group of users, perhaps members of a subgroup say, or some other defined group. Is this possible?
Is there any established way for achieving this kind of thing?
Thanks in advance for your advice,
Craig
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| Decommissioning A Groupsite | 3 | 0 | 139 | ||
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Hi, Craig -
Welcome to Groupsites and thanks for writing here in Champions.
Unlike applications such as Facebook, Groupsites are group-centric -- everything about them is centered around communicating, sharing and networking, together, to make things happen. Groupsites also follows a philosophy to keep the system user-friendly and not overdo it in adding too many features, but rather add only the best features...those needed by 90% of the groups 90% of the time. Therefore, you will find that the system does not have individual blogs associated with individuals' user profiles - and, especially individual blogs with the complexity of visibility options as you've described.
One suggestion: it may be possible that the Groupsite subgroup blogs can function to serve your purpose. You could technically create and name one subgroup for each member. Then, each member could add the name of their blog (subgroup) in the "Customize My Profile" section of their of their profile, and hyperlink that text to their own personal subgroup, thereby associating their blog with their profile. As the Groupsite Manager, you can also invite the appropriate people to each subgroup (blog) to control who sees each one (although to make this more manageable and pleasant for everyone - especially if you are working with a large numbers of individuals - I would suggest subscribing to a bundle that includes the ability to assign members to subgroups.)
One thing that may not work for you: while folks can leave and respond to comments on Groupsite blog posts, the author of the blog is not today alerted when someone posts a comment to it. For that reason I might also suggest you consider subgroup discussion forums instead of the blog feature, which may also work to serve your purpose, and the originator of the topic as well as users who participate in or subscribe to the topic can receive every user's reply to the discussion via email.
If there are more established ways to handle this, I don't know - but welcome any Champions' experience here.
I hope this helps.
Diana Giglio
Groupsite.com Support
Are people limited as to how many subgroups they can create?
But yes, my idea was also to set up the discussion forums to be used as blogs, though if the member base is not tiny, that would mean a whole lot of work for the group admin.
I like the group blog feature, and hope it will remain, even if there comes a time when Groupsites does add an individual blog feature.
Personally I like the community blog as it would save having to go to each profile to check out everyone's blogs.
Very pleased with Groupsite so far.
Hi Capri,
Thanks for your feedback! Today, in our "freemium package" the maximum number of subgroups allowed is 5. In paid groups, the number of subgroups is unlimited... but I believe there are plans to change this.
Sincerely,
Celeste Sharper Wooten
Director, Client Services/Support