To be honest I didn't know what to expect when I added the weblog features to the site. They were in the original codebase which I took as my starting point, and I removed them before making the site live for the first time - I figured they were pointless!.

Over time I began to realise that one way of making a community was to encourage people to stay "on" the site more often - making it sticky so I re-added them. Once I did that I started expanding them, adding the ability for users to comment for example.

I've seen three different classes of users so far:

• People who post questions for others to answer.
• People who just write general "life" blog entries.
• People who make detailed entries which seem either to be for their own reference, or to help others out via google searches.

That said I don't think I've ever suggested what people can or cannot post upon their entries. I'm prepared to remove offensive/trolling entries from the site sidebar - but otherwise people are welcome to use them as they see fit.

I find it easiest to read the entries en masse via the planet aggregator, since this shows all of the recent entries without any missing ones. (because the sidebar only shows one entry per-person regardless of how many are posted.)

Personally I feel happy when I see somebody post a question in a weblog, and get it answered. I think it is fair to say that several people have posted questions in their blogs without even trying to submit them as article questsion - and had they done so I would have accepted them.

I'm not sure whether that is because people didn't feel confident it would be accepted, or that they have just seen others do it and get results so they figured they'd do the same.

As for posting links to pieces elsewhere: One of the big reasons I don't do that is because other sites such as yours do that so well already!

It seems that posting a link to an interesting Debian article on HowtoForge is the kind of thing that you're doing - and I am utterly unwilling to compete directly with anybody else, especially somebody doing a good job.

In terms of visitors we seem to be pulling a regular crowd here with a reasonable amount of traffic and I'm slightly worried that this crowd would move on and go elsewhere if I were to diversify too much into just reposting links to other peoples content - rather than limiting things to mostly original content, and focussed questions.

(Thats not to say that I believe linking to articles isn't useful, more that I think there are other people doing a better job of that than I could manage.)

I know that recently there was a piece commenting on the available community sites - it might be worth repeating that every three/six months just to point people at new sites, etc. The alternative is to create a "links" page - but I've always been suspicious of those, with just a list of URIs and a one-line comment I'm not sure how useful they would be.

Allowing voting, etc, might make it more useful but on the downside it'd potentially open things to gaming, something I like to avoid.

Steve