[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.

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! 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:

• Forums.We have forums for 5th Edition, Homebrews/Houserules. Character Builds, Older D&D Editions, Pathfinder, and more.
• Gamer Search. The world's largest gamer search database: find roleplayers near you!
• Downloads. There are thousands of items in the downloads area, including hundreds of character sheets.
• Features. Useful features like the D&D Pronunciation Guide, Hot Games Chart, D&D Product Schedule, and a history chart of the game.
• Reviews. A system which collects and aggregates reviews on the latest products. For example, Out of the Abyss is currently trending at 79%!
• News. And, of course, constant daily news on the news page, all about tabletop RPGS, including D&D! There's no better way to keep up with what's going on!

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

 

[Agamon]

While it may not be the way the majority of D&Ders communicate these days, there is still huge volumes of valuable player-created content on those forums. That stuff should really be archived; unfortunately it'll have to be done manually, as WotC has "norobots.txt" up on its site, meaning the Internet Archive can't access it. I hate how much terrific stuff was lost when they revamped the website w/o warning a year ago - only a small percentage of the stuff can be re-found under "archive.wizards.com". So much for keeping material on every edition alive again for playing with 5E...
Certainly we don't need to keep conflict and toxicity, but this is the equivalent to throwing the baby out with the bathwater...

Files are one thing, but web pages never really die.

 

[cmad1977]

Files are one thing, but web pages never really die.

Unless you destroy the phylactery deep within the bowels of Castle WoTC.

 

[Morrus]

We should certainly try to coordinate some kind of rescue of all the useful material on those forums. It would be a shame to lose it all. I'm not sure how to go about that, though.

 

[DLIMedia]

We should certainly try to coordinate some kind of rescue of all the useful material on those forums. It would be a shame to lose it all. I'm not sure how to go about that, though.

That's what's odd about this... It's fairly easy to simply disable logins, profiles or forum posts. Instead, they're going to just obliterate every part of it? I know it costs a little money to maintain, but WotC isn't that strapped... are they?

 

[Barantor]

We should certainly try to coordinate some kind of rescue of all the useful material on those forums. It would be a shame to lose it all. I'm not sure how to go about that, though.

Break it up by edition, then by setting. Anything that is generic rules just goes to edition, everything setting related goes to that obviously.

Have a post on the relevant forums here in enworld that is stickied and have someone moderate each section. Tons of copy pastas and you have it. Maybe make it into a .pdf later to download if someone feels froggy.

 

[Morrus]

Break it up by edition, then by setting. Anything that is generic rules just goes to edition, everything setting related goes to that obviously.

Have a post on the relevant forums here in enworld that is stickied and have someone moderate each section. Tons of copy pastas and you have it. Maybe make it into a .pdf later to download if someone feels froggy.

It was more about the work involved and who would do it, rather than where to put it. It sounds like an immense task.

 

[Jeremy E Grenemyer]

Lots of work went into wiki pages there as well. Very unfortunate to lose that good work.

 

[keterys]

I suspect there was more staff involved in maintaining the forums than all of the staff working on producing D&D products. I'm not too surprised by this decision, after their previous decisions.

They are very active on twitter, if you want information from an official source, and other sites (like this one!) do a better job on the managed forums angle.

 

[Mistwell]

It was more about the work involved and who would do it, rather than where to put it. It sounds like an immense task.

I am thinking of moving over the 5e guides.

 

[Barantor]

It was more about the work involved and who would do it, rather than where to put it. It sounds like an immense task.

Ah, would have to be volunteers passionate about it enough to want to do it of course. My concern would be for the older editions there probably isn't the following to even know what is important and what isn't.