...and people could just "Part 1 of 2" / "Part 2 of 2", I guess, and only whenever there's a real good reason on good content.
(Grudging tolerance, baby!)
The siloing of forum versus blog does not always work for cerebral matters such as "Area 51: Display Engineers" (a topic area of a specific gaming forum I run, one of the many I've been involved over the years).
And we've seen those cerebral posts by a quite a few here, on Urbantoronto.
And we know some project planners have been influenced by Urbantoronto.
And we know average frustration-level of a person is higher for somebody failing after 10,000 keypresses (And losing some text) than after 100 keypresses.
And we know it's not as easy to blog as to write a forum post, especially in the hacker & two-factor authentication world (a blog account commands much higher security than a forum account; trust me on this -- from my repeated hack attempts -- and this often precludes using common CMS apps in App Store that would otherwise make blogging easier. Makes CMS selection tough, whether one likes Wordpress or Drupal or whatnot)
Obviously, using an iPad from a GoTrain, forum posts are easier as a lot of CMS interfaces (e.g. Wordpress). At a typist speed of 600+ characters per minute (120WPM at 5 keypresses per word, statistic measured by typingtest.com) -- means I type 10,000 characters in only 15 minutes, though realistically it's usually 20 minutes due to proofreads and edits.
Otherwise one does not bother, if they get barriers to expression.
If you are targetting more of a higher-than-mainstream audience, to maximize banner revenue, that's fine, I guess -- it is understandable if you're hitting say, the 98-th percentile. On the other hand, at the bottom line this really is much ado about nothing, due to the very occasional (reasonable, rare) Part 1/2-Part 2/2 post-splitting people do anyway, they're at least forced to decide if it's worth continuing to posts. But potentially losing 1,500 extra characters I typed is still a frustration-inducing moment especially on a mobile device. At least now I know to copy-and-paste -- next time -- if I see the warning. Unless the iPad runs out of memory and refreshes the page, in which case, the text becomes lost.
As a compromise, some forum admins force a "More..." below a post height, forcing people to put relevant information in the visible part of their post, or to shorten the post so everything is visible. Far less frustration inducing. Not sure if this forum software includes such a feature to reduce the amount of visible text, or to allow users to choose how much of text to show before displaying "More...", but it's a rather neat adjustable compromise in the situations that I've seen it happen.
And, most of us, all have been there, one tries to lots of text into a mobile web browser (application forms, feedback forms, bug report forms, forums, newsgroups, whatnot) then something fails in a submit, or iPad browser crashes, and we've had to start over, etc. Fewer barriers to that, considering more than 50% of people are beginning to use mobile devices to visit certain types of discussion forums (not sure if this is true for UrbanToronto). This is just an additional consideration since frustration level of this is usually over, say 100x, times bigger if you've written lots of text (10,000 characters), than a forum member bored of long posts and skipping over them.
So therein is my explanation, why siloing blog vs forum has not always worked, in all forum use-cases in the past...
That said, I do observe the new forum software is good at saving drafts.
