How can I let readers post topics to an “Ask the Author” page?
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I have created a page on my blog called “Ask Dr. Church History.” Right now it runs as a single welcoming post with a whole whack of responses hanging onto it. This is terribly messy, as it does not allow discrete posting of separate questions from my readers as separate topics.
Is there any way to do the latter? Or am I stuck with the current messy format?
Dying to know,
Dr. Chris Armstrong
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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You might be better off with a forum structure for this part of your site. There are a few places you can go to set up a free forum. Then you’d be able to set up different topics where people can post their questions. You could use the custom menu options to link to it from your navigation as it would be seperate from your wordpress blog.
If this isn’t viable you could show fewer comments per page which would make it look less cluttered (but not solve the categorisation issue). Go to Settings > Discussion from your dashboard and change “Break comments into pages with XX top level comments per page” into something slightly less and see if this works any better for you.
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Thanks for the answer, hallluke. I’m not sure how, within wordpress.com, I can do the “forum” thing. Are you referring to options within a larger site that has wordpress.org embedded? If not, then perhaps you could indicate a specific menu/hierarchy within wordpress.com to get a forum set up.
For now, I have set this up to require that people wanting to post questions do a quick response (and I will show fewer; good suggestion) to the main item requesting contributor status. Then I give them that status. Then they post. Then I approve the post. A bit clunky, and may put some people off, but if they really want to ask a question, then maybe they’ll push through.
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The forum idea can’t be done with wordpress.com, but you can sign up for a free forum (ask google to help you find one) and link to it from your wordpress.com blog. This might not be ideal if you want to manage everything from your wordpress.com account dashboard and have all your pages styled identically. However it would give you the option of having different pre-defined topics of conversation where people can post and browse for answers. Another option is to ask for questions and pick the most interesting ones as inspiration for your next blog post.
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If you don’t have hundreds of daily comments, you could have a contact form called “Ask Dr. Church History.” Your 29 comments there are not organized but with a contact form, readers could ask you questions (essentially via email) and you could make posts about their questions, with your answers.
You can’t categorize pages or comments, but with your posts, you could make categories: similar questions going to the same category.
Readers would be able to find topics of interest, you would not have to open your blog to complications of adding users as contributors…just my thoughts on the issue
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Excellent suggestion, 1tess–thank you. I may do this AND the contributor idea. I’ll look into it.
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