Six Log: How are you using the tool?

I currently run the following blogs. All are personal hobbies, non-commercial, non-profit, blah blah blah.

• The Average Bear: This Blog. 1 Blog, 1 Author.
• Random Encounters: A RPG Gaming-related Blog, splitting out my RPG gaming stuff from “everything else”, not always due to volume as much as the number of Categories that section of my life requires. +1 Blog, +0 authors
• Chrysalis: An active RPG gaming blog for a campaign on which all the players post. +1 Blog, +7 Authors.
• Cry Havoc: a gaming blog for Randy’s Cry Havoc Amber DRPG campaign. The game’s over and the blog needs to either transfer to his new MT install as either a second blog or (more likely) as static pages to his new domain. +1 Blog (defunct, not counted below), +1 Author (who would still need to be on the list of authors even if the blog went away).
• Hidden Things: a writing blog where I write. .htaccess and robots.txt has this blog hidden away (hence the name), so I don’t think this applies to the license. +1 Blog (not counted? I dunno), +0 Authors
• Writing in the Dark: An on-again, off-again blog meant to help writers support each other with attaboys and word counts during things like NaNoWriMo. +1 Blog, currently +4 authors, after I figured out who was already included from the other blogs.
• Pulp Adventures!: An inactive, announcement-only blog for the front page of an RPG game. Should become a static page, because in two years I’ve posted 13 entries, mostly ‘where we’re playing next stuff’, which I can use the mailing list for more effectively.

So that’s 5 active blogs (maybe 6?), 10-12 authors. All of them fall under the Average-bear domain except for Pulp Adventures, which I’m probably disabling soon anyway. No idea where that puts me on the pay scale ($150-$180? heh), since I haven’t seen any point in upgrading since 2.64 (which I’ve already paid forty bucks for in voluntary contributions to 6A).

Frankly, if it came right down to it, I could (I wouldn’t want to, but I could) switch those high-author gaming blogs to a wiki, which (a) is good code and (b) doesn’t piss around with counting authors for non-profit hobby sites. The one and only reason I haven’t is simply because blogging code offers the ability to comment on each entry and creating mini-discussions, which I think promotes the feeling of community more.

Come right down to it, though, I can see a way to hack a standalone comment package to work with a PMWiki pretty easily. I suppose it would be worth it to do so.

I mean, it's probably worth noting that some of the division into multiple blogs, at least, is just for convenience of organization. The Random stuff used to be under your main blog, but it's more convenient (and, now, suddenly, more costly?) to have it broken out. Ditto various game blogs, really.

So one issue with the licensing structure is not that you're getting twice the functionality of two blogs rather than one, but moderate convenience. Does that somehow pull extra money out of 6A's wallet (which it thus wants to pull back)?

The author thing is another one. You could handle a lot of that via comments, if you wanted to duck under the licensing agreement. E.g., a master journal entry by you for each of the Nobilis players, with their logs going in as comments. No license limit on commenters, after all! But should you have to do that?

Heck, for that matter, the nature of our authorial contributions to any of your blogs is such that if we all used one generic ID and simply signed our stuff, it wouldn't be that big a deal. It woudld be a minor inconvenience, but we could be "legal" and under the limit. Is that worth it? Is it worth 6A's time and effort to force that?

Make the package $50-70, no blog or author limit for non-commercial use. That might let a few outlying heavy-multi-person blogs (e.g., BoingBoing) get away with something they "shouldn't," but it would still 99.5% of the complaints out there from the vocal few who think that collaborative blogs are a good thing, not necessarily an expensive thing.

Point of order:

The Random stuff used to be under your main blog.

Actually, no... Random Encounters was the first MT-blog I created... I then ported over my blogger files to create the second blog under MT, which was Average-bear/Bears-cave (it looks older because it *is* older, if you count Blogger-time, but it's not my oldest MT-blog. The two have always been seperate.

Anyway, yeah... I've considered Hacks like the comments-under-the-log thing, or just having people email my their stuff and posting it myself... the kind of annoying crap that I did with TiHE that blogs let me STOP doing.

No move forward should feel so much like a move back. I'd rather have a move away if it comes to that (even if it's just in regards to how to do game pages).

Ah. My mistake. 'Scuse.

I believe you can also switch to WordPress, which is a free blog software. It is as easy as MT to me.