Should SE roll their own Blogging software?

Question

SE has a new GIS blog. It uses Wordpress (WP).

I see these shortcomings:

• Voting not supported for blog posts/comments.

• Identity management - bloggers need a WP login, comments require captcha.

• No trackbacks from questions posted in the main site referencing blog posts.

Each of these could be addressed if SE enhanced the main site to support blogs.

SE has Q&A nailed - now it's time for A&Q. A blog post can be thought of as an answer in search of questions. Q&A threads spawned in the comments section of a popular blog post can become quickly tangled. By linking questions on the main site with blog posts (and vice versa) SE could solve this.

Who knows, this might attract bloggers who've fallen off the wagon, too tired to sort through and answer questions posted in their comments section. By blogging at SE, they could focus on the highly voted questions.

Answer 1

I agree that a SE blog more integrated with the main SE site would be very nice to have. I'm not sure rolling a totally new blog engine is a pragmatic idea - WP is mature, has tons of mature plug-ins - and we would loose all that with a custom blog engine. In fact, StackExchange integration could be implemented as yet another plug-in for WP.

I have another gripe with our GIS SE setup: I don't receive e-mail notifications for my posts' comments. Without them it will be very impractical to follow the discussions and answer questions.

Answer 2

I second the problem with identity management,

and third having to enter captcha's for comments; that blows. I'm getting captcha'd all over the net now, in some places even for logins. At times it's worse than having to skip over spam. There are places I used to contribute where I don't bother anymore.

One thing to add: I'm now quite accustomed to the smooth editing user experience on Stack, especially with regard to [ctrl]-[L] for adding links and [ctrl]-[K] for code. It would be nice to have some of that blog-side. On the other hand some of the rich text experience of WP would be nice to have here.

Answer 3

The platform used for community blogs (like that of GIS SE) is under the control of Meta SE, where there has been discussion as Can Community Blogs be redeemed?

However, there have been no posts to the GIS Blog for towards 5 years, and I seem to recall that it was turned read-only a few years ago, so I am setting this to status-deferred (to Meta SE).