I’m using CommunityServer for the blogs, picture galleries and forums. Forums and gallery are empty for now and I’m focusing all my energy on the blogs feature. It seems like configuration of the blogs is pretty limited. Often, more often than I like, it feels like .Text was added to the CS application, but configuration of the CS was not adapted for the use with the blogs.

There are specialized configuration panels for blogs, forums, and galleries. There’s also a configuration panel for the whole application, and that is the place that makes configuring blogs not very intuitive activity at the moment. For example to enable anonymous comments I have to turn on “Allow anonymous posts” option on, whose description says that this option controls anonymous posts onto the forums. After that, “Enable anonymous comments” option appears in each individual blog configuration, and it has to be manually enabled to allow anonymous posts. Now isn’t this slick? No, it’s not. It is counterintuitive. I’m still not 100% sure about what effects other options in the system configuration have on the blogs. CommunityServer is a very neat and useful web application, probably one of the best for ASP.NET platform with the features it provides, however there is still quite a lot of space for improvements.

Unfortunately, this is not the only example of bad application configuration structure. Often application has some very neat and useful options buried under the layers of legacy design and bad decisions. At the same time, it is not an easy task to make configuration quick, simple, and intuitive for the user, and allow precise customization and control. I often see similarly bad trends outside of computer world, in electronic and mechanical tools.

I don’t really have an answer for the problem of how to make the world around us easier to customize for our needs, but often I get an impression that configuration is added as an afterthought and as a result many qualities of a good and intuitive configuration are lost. It is very important to break away from this habit and look after the potential users. Too many people are confused every day by poor configuration designs and thus are unable to use various tools to their full potential.