User blog:Schiffy/Blog vs. Forums: Where do I post?

Alright, so this has been bugging me for a while now. Apparently people don't seem to understand the difference between the User Blog feature and the Forums. So without further ado, here is....

Blogs vs. Forums: Where do I post? With Schffy

Here, I'm going to go over the two types of posts, and show a few examples of each.

First is the Forums. They can be found in Special:Forum, and are a fairly new feature in Wikia, added, I believe, around the same time as Message Walls (they are similar yet separate features, and Message Wall is disabled on Bleach Wiki in favor of User Talk pages). The two most used subsections of the Forums here on Bleach Wiki are the General Discussion board, and the Questions and Answers board. The General Discussion board, as the name suggests, is a board to discuss things with other users. Since this is the Bleach Wiki, these discussions well, of course, tend to be about Bleach. A good example of a post on the General Discussion Board can be found here, a post titled "The Ichigo Kurosaki Riddle". It's a rather drawn out discussion about Ichigo Kurosaki. In it, you'll see a number of differing opinions about Ichigo and his background, his powers, his lineage, etc. With over 200 replies, it is easily one of the most popular forum posts here on Bleach Wiki, and one of the best examples of one.

The other board I mentioned, the Questions and Answers board, is for, of course, questions and answers. A good, simple example of a post on this board is How do people age in the soul society? It's a rather simple question, with (at the moment) two replies. It's a serious question from a fan about Bleach. Perfect example of a good post on that board. Now, if you want to ask a question about Bleach Wiki itself (along with discussing page merges, style changes, etc.), there's another board, the self-explanatory Improvements and Issues board.

Now on to blog posts. Blog posts, which can be done through your User blog page, are good for longer posts meant to have multiple discussions in the comments. Some examples of good blog posts are SunXia's blog about the Image Policy, one of Xilinoc's many chapter reviews, Kamikaze839's series of character analysis blogs, and my plug for the Inconsistency Project. If you look through the comments of these blogs, you'll notice that multiple discussions can be had separately, each one having a starting comment ("parent comment") and a number of replies ("child comments") following them.

Now, of course, with User blogs, there's going to be some bad examples as well. One great bad example is this one, in which a user is inquiring about why images he added to pages were being removed. This sort of question would be better suited for the talk page of the user reverting said edits, not a User Blog. Another example of something that should not be in the blogs is this deleted blog. It was a single sentence: "Who do you think is physically more powerful?" This is something that should have been in the Forums. It was a question about a theoretical Bleach fight (that will never happen anyway), looking for opinions. I've been seeing this alot recently in the form of User blogs, and honestly, it's getting ridiculous.

So, to wrap it up, when you have something you want to say, you should think about where it should go before placing it. Want to talk about improving or making a change to a specific article? Go to that article's talk page. Want to discuss Bleach? Have a question about Bleach? Simply looking to talk with other users and get their opinions? Go to the forums. Wondering why someone undid your edit? Ask that user on their talk page directly. If you have something a bit more drawn out, then it makes sense to use the User Blog feature. But please, stop placing such simple questions in User Blogs. You are essentially creating a whole new page that doesn't need to be here, and the more of those that show up, the more that get deleted.