Hi all,
Appreciate your concern. As the guy who put this section together in the first place I thought I'd share some insight on why we're deregulating blogs.
The User Blogs forum is only a forum in the loosest sense of the word. It's really just where blog posts get posted. If you have your own blog, there aren't really any restrictions on what kind of things you can talk about; there's nothing wrong about posting a movie review in your blog, or pontificating about Brawl or most anything else. Even if you could have conceivably posted about those things in another room, I don't think it's a big deal. After all, much of the point of a blog is to give people that space to rant/pontificate/whatever.
So I really don't think of User Blogs as a room. If I did I'd just disable the "blogs" part of it and let you all post threads in here directly. The only reason this room is visible at all is because I wanted to use the forum as a backend to store comments (which means blog posts have to become threads) and once you've gone that far people are going to be able to find the "user blogs room" anyway, so you might as well just link to it so people don't think it's anything special (like a "secret room").
We're still going to enforce the Global Rules like always. And I'm not saying you'll be able to just get away with posting "omg booser is teh bets1!!111" without at least having your thread locked--it is your blog, but no, we don't have to let people comment on that (and strictly speaking, it's against the Global Rules, and we've said we'd enforce those from Day 1). Beyond that I think we should be pretty hands off with what people can choose to write about with their own blogs, because the principle of a blog is just that: personal space for you to use, for the most part, as you see fit.
With that said, I appreciate that since all blog posts are posted in a forum, there have been some unintended side effects. I'd like to see what we can do to alleviate your concerns about wading through posts that you're not interested in--one way might be to subscribe to your favorite blogs via RSS, for example--but I also hope you can understand my motivation in letting people have as much freedom as possible in choosing what to discuss in their own blogs, since that really was one of the key principles behind their creation.
