Feature: 'Blog View' mode

[Jens Roland]

This idea is definitely out there, but hear me out: A forum is just a blogging platform pivoted by subcategory. Let's un-pivot it.

When I go to my local Hobby Electronics Forum and write a post in the Arduino board called "Watering my plants with Arduino", this is analogous to me going to my own blog and writing a new blog post titled "Watering my plants with Arduino" and publishing it with a Category of 'Arduino'.

From a data modelling perspective the two are equivalent, but we are used to forums looking and behaving a certain way, and blogs looking and behaving in another.

Implementation-wise, the differences are subtle and almost entirely limited to the view layer.

Forum concept	Analogous Blog concept
Subforum / board	Post category
Thread	Blog post
Post	Comment
OP	Blog author
Forum user profile page w. bio	Blog front page w. bio
Board index page	N/A
N/A	Posts by Category page
Search	Search (in author threads only)

So imagine if the software was able to display a 'Blog view' of any thread. Effectively there would be two entry points for any piece of content -- the forum mode being focused around discussion UX, and the blog mode focused on reading UX and putting thread authors front and center.

This would instantly turn any significantly-large forum into a domain specific Medium competitor ;-)

[Lonnie Ezell]

I actually like the idea. It ties in very well with a personal project I wanted to build on top of this at some point. I think the user would need to be able to choose which to write, perhaps with a simple Toggle switch.

Then again, I've thought for years that it would be awesome to have thread "types" which simply tells how to display that first post, and this is pretty similar to that. Things like an image, a gist, a poll, etc, could all be displayed differently based on the focus of that original content. This would be similar to that idea, but would probably work best if the content was shown in a different tab altogether.