Comments vs forum replies

MilesDB

Well-known member
Is it really worth using forum threads for comments when running CMS alonside board? Apart from comments being searchable from inside forum, what are the other benefits of such integration?

Example screenshot is from Contentteller site.

ct_xen.webp
 
For myself the Home page is eye candy for the forums.. My forums have always been the focal point of any of my communities.. But i literally have 50 to 100 guests in my largest forum at any given time of the day or night, Unfortunately the members actually only have a small handful of members online at the same time.. Most my guests are surfing the CMS portions of my site.. thread reply's give my home page the appearance of an active site.. Which it is, but this really works in my favor because people who read our articles but never visit the forum sometimes register to comment on an article.. I just think it promotes registrations to a point that seperate comments would not.. Funny but my members never read the home page content they go straight to the forums and would never leave a comment on the CMS portions making my site look dead to guests.. Thats my experience with vB4 cms

On the other hand i also have another site using vB4 as the forum and Joomla as the CMS.. The site is not bridged and registration on the Joomla site is disabled. We publish several original articles and allow guests to leave comments on the Joomla portion. I can tell you from my own experience that on this site i have two distinct sets of Visitors, one set uses the Home page to read News, Articles Blogs and Commentaries, and the other seems to visit the forum exclusively and in some cases dont even know we have a home page.
 
Is it really worth using forum threads for comments when running CMS alonside board? Apart from comments being searchable from inside forum, what are the other benefits of such integration?

(1) Members who go straight to the forums could find an article by seeing it in the "What's new" list.
(2) Forums surfers would be able to see when new comments have been made to the article.

I don't think it is essential to have articles and their comments in the forums ... but ...
Can you think of any drawbacks of Article comment integration with the forums ?
 
What would be ideal for me would be the ability to allow guests to comment on the article from the home page but not show up on the forum discussion but at the same time the CMS will auto post a reply to the comments portion of the home page article.. This making the two portions of the site the same but different.. . That probably didnt make alot of sense.. But i would never allow a guest to post on my forum but at the same time have no problems letting them comment on an article or even a post promoted to an article..
 
What would be ideal for me would be the ability to allow guests to comment on the article from the home page but not show up on the forum discussion

Guest Commenting, a very important issue.
I think most "Forum-based" CMS stuff does not allow Guest Commenting.

It would be helpful to know how Spiders index the Forums.
 
Interesting that on vB you can allow guests to comment from the blogs but this is not a permission on the CMS..
 
Can you think of any drawbacks of Article comment integration with the forums ?
First, such a set-up is user unfriendly because forum threads do not display articles. It's just links to them. So, users have to leave forum to read articles. Much like directing readers to a different site.

Second, comments get dublicated. IMHO it's an overkill.

Third, articles are not searchable from within forum; comments are.
 
I would like to see such an integration between XF and WP. For example we can attach wordpress categories to the forum's ones and after making a post there will be a new forum thread with all the content form the post (even better if it is retrieved right from the wordpress post).
 
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