Off and on for several years I've been part of a local political forum using Blogger.
Usually a new topic will be posted every week, and group of thirty or forty enthusiastic people will generate fifty to a hundred comments.
The challenge is that we're overwhelmed by Anons, who go off wildly in all directions, dwell endlessly on personal vendettas, and lately get far too close to outright libel of other people. Consensus in the past has been that allowing Anons is good thing, but we're realizing that we really need to be able to moderate their comments.
What we really want is something simple enough for non-experts, not needing our own hosting, that will allow us to:
The good thing about Blogger is that it doesn't seem to get blasted with comment spam, as seems to be the case with WordPress blogs for instance. The bad thing is that your only choice with Anons is either all-in, or all-out. Either you cut them out entirely, or you give them full rein to wreak havok.
We'd appreciate being pointed to something similar to Blogger, but just a little bit more featured, and not part some large environment like Google Groups or Facebook. Although letting people log in using Facebook, Twitter, or Google IDs (or Open ID, whatever) is good too.
I'm in the process of checking out Weebly and whatever else Google throws at me, but am hoping that the Soylent community can suggest something more appropriate that can be up and running with minimal fuss.
(Score: 3, Informative) by blackhawk on Monday November 21 2016, @01:47PM
That's a combination of admins not updating the sites to the latest patches, and rogue plug-ins being installed by over-zealous users.
Wordpress.com just updates the stuff for me, which is great, since I have zero interest in having to keep a site patched these days. I run very few plug-ins, just the spam filter basically, so that's also not a concern.
In short, they offer a free Wordpress site, that is maintained by them, updated by them and has access to a bunch of good plug-ins - some of which you will need to pay for if you use them. It's secure in the sense that it's not on your infrastructure and gets timely updates from the Wordpress team.
The only drawbacks for you might be that they reserve the right to run some adds. I've never seen any on my site, but then my site is for very specific programming tech and is low traffic.
At any time, you can export your site for backup purposes or to import it to any other Wordpress host.
Further, word is that security for Wordpress these days is pretty good, and on par with any other publishing platform.