Chris R

This is now a feature.





Notice that articles created from an RSS import have a little RSS page icon next to the "Posted by" line. This makes it clear it's an import.

Of course, you can switch the entire system off in settings and control who / how many RSS items can be imported on a per-group basis.

We've discussed this. It may make it in 2.1.0. The most complex bit is actually grinding the RSS feeds in, in terms of scheduling. A busy board may constantly have a dozen imports going at once.

This option could be handy yes Maybe its also an idea to add a limit of use on coupon codes?

Sounds like a good move. And would be good for integrating the personal side of things that make members feel as though they belong or have "ownership" of parts of the site.

I think that this would indeed be a good feature. There are already many bloggers out there (either using a blog at a free bloghoster (wordpress.com or blogger or something else) or even with on their on website. I think that those people couldnt be convinced to switch to using IP.Blog when they already have an well-established blog which has many articles and regular readers. Nevertheless a forum/online community could profit from the content generated by those bloggers. It would serve the forum as well as the blogger if there was the possibility to display content from an external blog within a blog created with IP.Blog. The blogger would set up a blog using IP.Blog and then he could choose either "hosted blog" or "linked blog" or the "import external blog" (I just call it this way now) via RSS feed or something else and everything he posts at his external blog would be posted at his IP.Blog too. The forum would get additional content and the blogger could reach a bigger audience - a win-win situation.

I don't know if they WILL do this only because they do allow that a member can link to an external blog that is not on the site.

I can understand that you may not want people to leave your site thus utilizing a RSS would accomplish this. I hope that you do find something if it isn't implemented.

I think this would be a very useful feature.

I can only speak from my own experience running various communities: hardly anyone likes to have their blog hosted on a forum site. There are some rare cases where a user will use the forum blog to post about forum-specific things, but the vast majority of people who are willing to blog at all have a blog of their own. It's disgustingly simple to sign up for blogger or wordpress.

Having a blog app on the forums is wonderful -- but no one uses it. They don't want to split up content between the forum and their own personal blog. The end result is, they ditch the forum blog and just continue to use their own.

But if posts could be syndicated from an external blog, like Amazon does (to great success I might add!), then we get the benefit of blogs even when users are using some other site. It adds just another feature for users to continue to come back and use the site.

I wrote a mod that did this for another forum software and the users LOVED it. It was a really well received feature. We started displaying "Last Blog Post" in the postbit which encouraged more posting (most of which was legitimate, not spam). The whole community saw a bump in participation.

People love to share their blogs, they just need an efficient way to do it. I'd rather syndicate posts and keep visitors on my own site, rather than have them click a link in a signature or something and leave my site.