BuddyPress.org

I don’t consider this a “generic” feature request, but an important element of increasing usability. Microblogging is fine for small to medium-sized “trusted” community, but not for the site I am redesigning, which has a forum with nearly 20,000 users. Most users are short-term, looking for solutions to a problem, and once they get what they came for, most never return. I’m hoping to change that with the new BuddyPress design.

The site I am developing is all about a variety of user interaction in one place, and allowing 20,000 strangers to each have their own blog would be a disaster. Most people don’t want or need their own blog any more, and prefer to publish and interact in one centralized, standardized location — hence the popularity of Facebook.

So, I think the real value in BP is Groups + Forum: Groups for looser, more spontaneous communication, like Facebook, and Forums for more structured, searchable and archived collections of information. If you @Peterverkooijen are not interested in Forums, but want to give your users blogs, that’s fine — just use WPMU, or WPMU + BuddyPress but disable the Forums.

Forums have great value for many types of sites — we’re successfully using one right now, in fact.