[wp-hackers] Creating an "Author Cafe"

[Jeremy Clarke]

The other options may also be involved but you should also consider the
benefits of just making it a page instead of a post. Less likely to
interfere with most of the queries on your site and there's probably a lot
less pages overall. Semantically it also seems closer to a special page than
it is to a post (you'll also have access to the custom page templates, which
would probably be  useful for setting up your modified comments structure).

Another thing to consider is per-author contact forms on their user post
listing pages. We use that on our site and it seems to do a lot of the work
of giving authors access to each other without making their emails public.
It obviously also gives site visitors a private way of contacting authors.
Not sure if there's a plugin out there, we use one I mostly coded myself,
but its pretty basic if you know what you're doing ( check out
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/really-simple-captcha/ for a captcha
framework you could incorporate).

-- 
Jeremy Clarke | http://jeremyclarke.org
Code and Design | http://globalvoicesonline.org