Tuesday, September 22, 2015

About Wizards Forums Closing

It's a light week for me, so I'll talk a bit about WotC closing their community forums in October. From a personal POV those forums have been dead to me for many years now. The once decent Greyhawk forum (a sad subforum of "Other Worlds") saw cross-traffic between it and places like Canonfire and ENWorld then was suddenly and effectively abandoned at the outset of 4E, I'm not sure people moved on to other forums because there was no good 4E Greyhawk material to discuss since Wizards DID publish Greyhawk material in eDungeon/Dragon, and also put out reprints of classic books. Maybe these efforts were discussed in other locations on the Wizards forums, but as a dedicated forum to Greyhawk, the community was long gone from there by the time 5E rolled around.

I definitely agree with their sentiment that technology has changed things. Forums still have their place, since they are best for finding news and information in long form. For quick topics however, discussion and Q&A type things, blogs and social media are easier to follow on a daily basis rather than a forum thread which runs in the dozens of pages. So in short, no sadness here about Wizards dumping their forums. Much like their current adventures, the task of community building is better handled by other sources.

p.s. you can contact me on Twitter @GreyhawkMike

1 comment:

grodog said...

Mike---

Have you heard anything about efforts to archive the forum at all, similar to what was done when Greyhawk-l shut down?

Allan.