[UPDATED] WotC To Close Forums - Including D&D and M:tG (aka "Welcome New Forum Members to EN World!

WotC has announced that it will be closing its forums, which they refer to as a "former foundation of our community". The forums will close on October 29th. Of course, WotC's forum members are welcome here at EN World (although the expectations are a little different, so please do check the rules if you sign up!) The forums have been around for nearly two decades, in various incarnations, but WotC cites the rise of social media platforms as the reason for the closure.
WotC has announced that it will be closing its forums, which they refer to as a "former foundation of our community". The forums will close on October 29th. Of course, WotC's forum members are welcome here at EN World (although the expectations are a little different, so please do check the rules if you sign up!) The forums have been around for nearly two decades, in various incarnations, but WotC cites the rise of social media platforms as the reason for the closure.

Here's the announcement in full.

Choosing to retire a former foundation of our community was not an easy decision, but we feel that we must adjust our communications structure to reflect where conversations about Wizards of the Coast games are taking place.

Social media has changed significantly over the last ten years, and discussions about games aren't exclusive to company-hosted forums. The majority of community conversation takes place on third-party websites (such as Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and many other fantastic community-run websites), and it is up to us to evolve alongside our players.

We encourage past and current users to retrieve any information you want to retain from the Community Forums for both Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering. The shutdown will occur on October 29, 2015, at 10:00 a.m. PT. We want to provide enough time for our forum members to move their content, and we recognize that given our forum's vibrant user base and extensive history, this may take time. Any information still on the forums on the cut-off date will be deleted.

Thank you to all of our past and current forum users. You helped build our community into what it is now, and we look forward to continuing to interact with you on our many active social platforms.


WotC's Trevor Kidd had a little more to add.

"I could hop onto all the forums having this discussion or I can say it here and let it disseminate. I'm choosing the former. Moving away from running our own forums doesn't mean we think longer conversations or fan sites/forums aren't good or necessary. They are both good & necessary. From what I'm seeing, they flourish and you enjoy them more when they are run/managed by fans.

DnD & RPGs in general are all about story telling & talking with friends. It makes sense that we want to share those stories. So, it's vital that we have places to share those experiences & stories, like forums & fansites. But it's not vital that #dnd run those.

Closing our forums does not in any way lessen our interactions. We'll still be talking & lurking in your social media & fan sites. And the idea that forums are going away because dnd &/or magic are doing poorly - that's ludicrous! :P Both are doing very, very well.

We'll still be talking with you here, and elsewhere. Enjoy your new forum homes and don't forget to migrate your treasured content!

On the topic of losing forum content - it's tough, I agree. Once we knew we were going to close the forums, we also knew we weren't going to maintain the community site indefinitely, so we opted to pull the band-aid off quickly rather than let it linger."


Welcome to new members!

If you're a refugee from WotC's forums, you are very welcome here. You can register here at EN World by clicking here. You'll find out community busy and vibrant, and generally welcoming. We've been here over 15 years now, and there is tons of useful content here and lots of great resources which you're welcome to explore. These include:


(Announcement spotted initially by Critical Hits on the Twitters).
 

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Dragon+, though, is fairly awful. I've got the app on my phone... it's basically all marketing stuff. Nothing I don't already know from a dozen other sources by the time it hits.

Which is EXACTLY the kind of thinking that got us crap like digital Dragon and digital Dungeon.
 

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Dragon+, though, is fairly awful. I've got the app on my phone... it's basically all marketing stuff. Nothing I don't already know from a dozen other sources by the time it hits.

I did notice a change on the WOTC forums when Dragon+ was introduced.
Before Dreagon+ was introduced there would be a official post daying a new article was up, after Dragon+ was launched they stoped doing thse offical posts.
 


Gleemax Farewell
Posted By: randyb, 7/28/2008 10:38:56 AM

Wizards of the Coast has made the decision to pull down its Gleemax social networking site in order to focus on other aspects of our digital initiatives, especially Magic Online and Dungeons & Dragons Insider. We continue to believe that fostering online community is an important part of taking care of our customers, but until we have our games up and running at a quality level we can be proud of, it will be the games themselves that receive the lion’s share of our attention and resources.

Our plan is to shut down Gleemax completely sometime in September. (I can’t give a more exact date because the timing depends on what’s going on with other projects.) To those of you who have posted to Gleemax, I thank you for your contributions over the past year. It is community members like you that made this project worth trying, and it is your efforts and words that gave it heart. You should save your blogs by copying that text somewhere else. Meanwhile, I encourage you to head over to the Wizards forums. The Wizards online community continues to thrive, and there should be lots of fun stuff to talk about over the coming months, including our digital offerings.

That’s the short version. The long version, as you might imagine, is a lot longer. And for me, it’s a lot more personal. I choose to work at Wizards of the Coast because I truly care about the games we make and the gamers we make them for. I come to work each day because I was lucky enough to become a gamer, and I want to make sure the dream is still there for the next guy who comes along.

For me, it’s actually been two different dream lifestyles: For a couple of years in the 90’s, I got to be a professional Magic player. I traveled the world, made some great friends, played what is still (in my opinion) the best strategy game ever made, and I made enough money to pay the bills while doing all of that. I’ve also had the privilege for almost a decade now to make games for a living. Working at Wizards sounds like a dream job to many of our diehard players, and the crazy part is that working at Wizards turns out to really be that dream job. The culture inside the building is an awesome blend of smarts and passion, and most days I can’t imagine a better place to work. I feel that it’s my duty to make sure both the games and the company are in an even better place when the next generation of smart kids comes along. Whether we’re playing D&D around the kitchen table, Friday Night Magic at your local store, or assorted German board games on Tuesday nights at Wizards headquarters, we’re all part of the same shared culture.

Anyway, all of that is what led me to be such a passionate evangelist, pushing to move Wizards in a more digital direction. It remains clear that gamers are moving online and if we’re going to preserve everything that is special about Wizards of the Coast—and the hobby gamer culture in general—then we have to move online too.

The mistake that I made, however, was in trying to push us too far too fast. I still think the vision for Gleemax is awesome: creating a place on the web where hobby gamers (or lifestyle gamers or thinking gamers, or whatever you want to call us) can gather to talk about games, play games, and find people to play games with. But I’ve come to realize that the vision was too ambitious. We’ve made progress down about ten different paths over the past eighteen months, but we haven’t been able to reach the end of any of them yet.

The correct strategy at this point is clear: we need to focus. We’re not going to abandon the vision, but we are going to put large chunks of it on the backburner until we prove that we can succeed at the most important pieces. Those pieces are Magic Online and D&D Insider.

Magic Online “V3” is up and running, but it took us a long time to get here and it’s by no means perfect. We have a lot of ideas about what we can do now to make the game better and we’ll be devoting significant resources in future months and years to doing precisely that.

D&D Insider functionality has started to roll out, but we’re still behind where we wanted to be. In the plus column, Dragon and Dungeon magazines have launched in their new online format, and they seem to be getting rave reviews. The Rules Compendium has also launched – it’s a searchable database that contains all the rules elements from all the 4th Edition books we publish. The magazines and the rules compendium are available now to anyone who signs up for a free trial of D&D Insider. Next up are improvements to those pieces plus beta-testing of the Character Builder, Character Visualizer, Dungeon Builder, and Game Table.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t leave us with any bandwidth to devote to Gleemax right now. Wizards of the Coast remains committed to online community, but instead of trying to grow a new website for a brand-agnostic community, we need to focus on keeping our own house in order. We have the two best games in the world, and we need to take care of them before expanding into new digital arenas.

Randy Buehler

Vice President of Digital Gaming

Wizards of the Coast
 



Which is EXACTLY the kind of thinking that got us crap like digital Dragon and digital Dungeon.

Insider was a far better product at full pay per month pricing than D+ is for free. Edition preferences/hates aside, it did include plenty of actual tabletop gaming material and adventures, unlike D+. I would like to see the digital rags back in 5e form, and I'd sub.
 

If you access a thread from the front page, it displays it in a News Article format. If you access the same thread via the forums, it displays it in a Forum Thread format.

It's a bit weird, but any front page thread that I want to get involved with I track down in the forums, so XP/laugh, reply w/ quote, and go advanced are available. (I have never used the Tapatalk app, so I can't help with app questions.)

This explains so much of the confusion I was having. Thank you
 



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