I've tried it out at my forums on sheepownage.com and its working quite well. Not as active as I hoped, but the users seem to be quite happy about the format thus far.

I've made it so that only the Blog Owner can post threads, but anyone even unregistered users can post comments/replies into the thread.

IMO its a fine temporary solution for the blog integration into vBulletin.

Agreed my users aren't that interested in advanced features, most just wanted a place ot rant and rave their thoughts.

Did you guys do any special modifications to templates or anything to make it more blog-like (is that even a word?)? ;)

Nah, I'm not worried about that stuff, I just want a simple easy to read place to post my thoughts.

Sounds like the true jury...our community users...really have spoken.

I think all this just comes down to getting what you pay for.

Hmmm... This might come very handy!

Thank you for the suggestion FASherman!

How about "microblogs" (or micro-blog, or mblog, or ?blog)? Microblogs are short lived blogs that people abandon, or have a preset life length. For example a vacation trip blog (ends once the vacation is over), or a surgery blog, or a sporting season blog, contest blog etc.

Excellent!

Now for the next piece to get this to the next level...

How about.. some sort of a "request blog" form which would allow queueing of requests for "blog space" from users, with all the appropriate fields filled in.

Then the admins, super-mods, etc can just say yes/no through a single click and the forum is created, rights set, user notified, etc!

THAT would be awesome! Any takers? I'll even throw a crisp 10 after this one, and a bag of apples.

I always liked the basic idea of simply using forums as blogs/journals and have set up a couple on alternativenation.net for tour diaries from a member there.
(example link)

It's not great but as an example of what inspired this thread it fits - it mainly just suited the quick set-up and needed integration for our New Posts users at the time though!

For 3.5 I've taken things a bit further using just the plugins and have almost managed to set up a system of one forum = blog for every user - filtering & sorting the thread results by userid. I think that would be much more practical than adding a forum for each user, a halfway house between completely no hacking and a fully fledged journal system add-on.

How do you guys allow your users to have mod positions in just their forums and nowhere else? I found that if I set a user as a moderator for their forum, they were also able to see into my mod staff forum.

I take it, I need to make a Blog Owners Usergroup?

You don't need to change a user's usergroup to make them a mod. :P

This thread is a hilarious read I gotta say LMAO ...Personally I still don`t see what the big thing is about these blogs ... Can`t ya just put your thoughts in a thread?

bare in mind I`ve yet to see one in action, I may change my opinion then :)

It took 4 pages but someone finally asked what I've been wondering...

If a person's in a FORUM, why would he need a BLOG to spill his guts when he already has the FORUM at his disposal?

I honestly don't understand the appeal of blogs... ?????

Just get a Blog script make a HTML page & you have a blog for users quests ect to post on. It's not that hard. And the appeal of blogs is many sites allow anyone to post a blog without signing up to your forums to make one rant or rave.

I think it makes people feel important that they have an entire section dedicated to them.

Already been done.

What about the VB Journal? Isn't that a type of blog? Perhaps not as customizable but i think I'm with Bofo on my lack of blogging experience :D

I'm still hoping someone will do like you just suggested; wouldn't need to be big at all but having it automatisated is just a way better than having to make everything yourself; especially if you have a big forum that's a way too much work.

I've thought about using the forum system for blogs, similar to what has been suggested. However, I don't want the blogs to be "part of" the forum system. I don't want a "Blog" forum.

In fact, I'm looking to incorporate an "Opinion & Analysis" section of my site. I would have specific "Staff Writers". They would offer analysis and opinion on specific topics related to the site. There would be an index for this section, and it would work like a blog: the analysis, with a link to comments.

I could simply use a stand-alone blog system, like WordPress, except I do want some integration with the forum:

1) I want posting and display managed by vBulletin. A new blog entry or comment should work just like "New Thread" or "Quick Reply".

2) Staff Writers should be able to "assign" a blog to a certain Category. Thus, when users are looking at a Category, they will see the standard index of forums, plus, underneath, titles and short excerpts of the latest blogs "associated" with that forum category.

So in essence, a forum per Staff Writer would work, however, I think I'd have to modify it drastically. I wouldn't want these blog forums to display in the forum index... I think I'd have to set up some separate SQL tables to associate certain blog entries with certain forum categories... modify the templates... a lot of work. That's why I've searched for a "plugin", it would save me doing this work.

Brinne basically covered it but whatever. A blog is basically where 1 person for lack of a better term +++++s all the attention, where as a forum everyone is trying to get attention.

I like the idea, but there are a couple of problems. For one, administration on giving users permissions when they decide they want a blog. For this to be feasible, there would have to be an addon that automatically creates the forums for users (within the blog section) and gives the proper permissions. The other problem is the format. Don't blogs usually go on one page? Using the forum system, I would assume each entry would have to be a separate thread (to allow comments after each).

-vissa