Official D&D and Magic the Gathering Forums to Be Shut Down
- Thread starter John Keefer
- Start date
A lot of video game companies still keep official forums, they can be a great resource for the community that develops around your game. I think it is a mistake for them to get rid of the official forums.
WotC Official forums got restructured a few years back, it was terrible, lost heaps of user data and accounts, and the layout widely unpopular. Huge portions of the community up and left, creating their own sites. Since then, WotC forums have had a general sense of poor management, and this seems like they finally just stopped pretending to care about running them.
If hosting a simple form costs you a 1000 dollars a day you are doing something very very wrong. The company i work for hosts a video platform on a dedicated box with amazon s3 for the videos and that costs us at best £200 a month.D3s_ToD3s said:
A simple form with no masses of storage needed would cost at best £20-30 a month.
You were right. I was beeing sarcastic. The hint to that was the "Cheap Cardboard" line, when in reality, their cardboard is quite expenseive.Thunderous Cacophony said:
As i said to Thunderous Cacophony, i wasn't serious. But WizCo sure is. Some Exec said: "Lets save a few bucks and add those to our millions" and so they axe the forumsalj said:
... Well, can't say it affects me personally in any way, but I hate to see things get deleted...
Trouble with forums is... You ever tried to archive one as a 3rd party?
They are a nightmare of circular links and other mazes that completely messes up any attempt to archive a forum decently.
And that's assuming the site admins aren't deliberately making it extra difficult for one reason or another.
It's a pity. If the people running the forums can't be bothered to archive anything, and 3rd party archiving is so... Difficult to manage, you can bet that forum shutdowns will lose a lot of things.
A lot of that would be stupid stuff, no doubt, but you never know what might have been there.
What do you think would be lost if the escapist shut down it's forums?
Certainly usergroup content is disposable by design.
Once a usergroup hits 350 or so pages, that's it. The old stuff starts to vanish into the ether.
That's even harder to back up than a forum...
For one thing you generally need login credentials to even read the content.
Not that it matters given how silly most of the stuff that goes on in them is, but so much of it, almost certainly gone forever, no matter what it was.
Oh, and if you think 350 pages goes back quite a while? Sure. For a quiet group, could be everything ever said.
But for a rather active one... Well, it's about 3-4 months worth, maybe...
Oh well.
Off on a tangent again I guess. I struggle with the thought of letting things go, even stuff that's barely relevant to me.
Like, the wizards of the coast forums. I have no personal attachment to anything whatsoever there. It just reminds me of my peculiar issues is all.
Trouble with forums is... You ever tried to archive one as a 3rd party?
They are a nightmare of circular links and other mazes that completely messes up any attempt to archive a forum decently.
And that's assuming the site admins aren't deliberately making it extra difficult for one reason or another.
It's a pity. If the people running the forums can't be bothered to archive anything, and 3rd party archiving is so... Difficult to manage, you can bet that forum shutdowns will lose a lot of things.
A lot of that would be stupid stuff, no doubt, but you never know what might have been there.
What do you think would be lost if the escapist shut down it's forums?
Certainly usergroup content is disposable by design.
Once a usergroup hits 350 or so pages, that's it. The old stuff starts to vanish into the ether.
That's even harder to back up than a forum...
For one thing you generally need login credentials to even read the content.
Not that it matters given how silly most of the stuff that goes on in them is, but so much of it, almost certainly gone forever, no matter what it was.
Oh, and if you think 350 pages goes back quite a while? Sure. For a quiet group, could be everything ever said.
But for a rather active one... Well, it's about 3-4 months worth, maybe...
Oh well.
Off on a tangent again I guess. I struggle with the thought of letting things go, even stuff that's barely relevant to me.
Like, the wizards of the coast forums. I have no personal attachment to anything whatsoever there. It just reminds me of my peculiar issues is all.
Speaking as a forum admin, this is so false, I can't even...D3s_ToD3s said:
My costs in total from Leaseweb totalled $103. A year. Heck even if I went with a powerful fancy pants public cloud virtual server solution, it would be... $373 a year. An effing pittance in even a small (hehehe) company such as WotC.
Hey, maybe the forums weren't so active. I can understand that. But all that archived information, once they shut it down, will ALL be lost. For GOOD. And for what as a replacement? Reddit?
What. A. Waste. Why don't they just lock registration and archive it? Boom, there you go. Like, $.05 a day to run that.
Captcha: great scott
Whatever, those forums are haunted by the same core group of like 10 people. And some of them are dicks, like every other rules lawyer they're convinced they are infallible.
But aside from that, the official sites themselves are garbage. They should be the go to source of information for their products, but they probably don't realize their atrocious site design drove people away.
But aside from that, the official sites themselves are garbage. They should be the go to source of information for their products, but they probably don't realize their atrocious site design drove people away.
That's sad to hear. I used to lurk there and even posted a tiny bit there. Though all I remember posting was my ideas in a thread about making a non-corruptible wish for a ton of gold.
Now off to make a popular subreddit where all we do is bash WotC 
Yup, not like this has happened before to companies...
Yup, not like this has happened before to companies...
Eh. It was basically a more formalized version of rpgnet for a long while; good and bad.
I didn't really have cause to leave until 2009, but I still lurked...read some of the guides, kept up with old contacts.
For a genre giant like WotC to shut down their public forums entirely means traffic and activity is dire.
Yes, traffic. Not profit margins.
WotC is owned and hosted by Hasbro. I sincerely doubt that Hasbro actually gives a shit about the relative pittance spent operating forums. Even a few grand a day is absolutely NOTHING compared to their regular operating budget; They've blown far more money on far less; annually.
I've seen the mob mentality that's roiled up from there in recent years.
And where it isn't a mob, it's tepid and insipid enough to make me want to roll my eyes straight out of my skull.
I didn't really have cause to leave until 2009, but I still lurked...read some of the guides, kept up with old contacts.
For a genre giant like WotC to shut down their public forums entirely means traffic and activity is dire.
Yes, traffic. Not profit margins.
WotC is owned and hosted by Hasbro. I sincerely doubt that Hasbro actually gives a shit about the relative pittance spent operating forums. Even a few grand a day is absolutely NOTHING compared to their regular operating budget; They've blown far more money on far less; annually.
Oddly succinct but nevertheless accurate. I share your attitude here, though I still value my personal privacy and professional integrity enough to not stick my neck out on the social media chopping block.Therumancer said:
I've seen the mob mentality that's roiled up from there in recent years.
And where it isn't a mob, it's tepid and insipid enough to make me want to roll my eyes straight out of my skull.
That's... that's just awful. Even if you didn't want to maintain an active forum as a forum, leaving what had been posted as an archive would've been a smart move. There must be thousands of guides and instruction books, tens of thousands of asked and answered questions...
An external forum is going to operate outside of your oversight, with little or no official support. What possible benefit could come from handing the core community aspect over to Facebook and its ilk? You save a little money on bandwidth?
An external forum is going to operate outside of your oversight, with little or no official support. What possible benefit could come from handing the core community aspect over to Facebook and its ilk? You save a little money on bandwidth?
I'm also seriously wondering how much people even have those kinds of conversations on Facebook.Recusant said:
Much prefer a regular forum for that kind of thing.
Running a forum does not cost a thousands of dollars a day or anywhere near that you can actually run a forum on the internet for free as there is all kinds of places that offer free forum hosting, Most of you web hosting today now offers shared hosting for about 3 to 4 dollars a month as for forum scripts there are several free ones out there such as phpbb, smf and many others, Now as far the reason they shut down the forums I do not buy that load of crap, What I think did it was people were asking questions on the forum that made people think and turn into heated debates, and pointed out simple cold hard facts about the game that simply could not be denied in short people were being made aware of things they have always taken for granted, This in turn, begin to turn people off of the game, which was losing wizards of the cost money...
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