Wizards Transitioning to a new community site 9/9

[Jester David]

I feel bad for WotC_Trevor.

Me too. That's a laundry list of problems.

The frustrating bit is, WotC has never really proven themselves as reliable bug squashers, especially when it comes to software.
They tend to work hard until the software reaches "close enough" status and/or they get busy working on other projects and pull people away from fixing bugs. I imagine we'll see some fixes and improvements over time until they get close to the date of D&D Next and decide to upgrade/overhaul the main website, and all improvements to the community site will cease.

 

[dd.stevenson]

Why don't they just post a redirect to paizo.com and be done with it?

Sorry. It's really hard to say something sober and constructive about their online community management at this stage.

 

[darjr]

Yea, at this point given that the devs and techs probably only have a short window to intensively work on it they should do the best thing for their users and put the old software up for as long as they can get away with it so folks can find and export their data, some of which is years and years and multiple (gleemax) upgrades in the making.

 

[darjr]

It looks like priority one was to keep the data they could except for the last few days (23?) and then go from there. I think that it looks like data is either missing or inaccessible or very difficult to find. An alternative to my last post might be to give folks a more raw direct access to their data for export.

 

[Dragonhelm]

This is, what, the 4th version of forum software that they've used? For the life of me, I don't see why they didn't stick with vBulletin. It works so much better, IMO.

I'll take a look around, but they lost me when they consolidated all the Other Worlds forums into one. They later put that back, but by then it was too late. That was the time that The Piazza got started. It's a wonderful celebration of RPG settings, D&D and beyond.

Hrm, an AJAX error...well, bugs are to be expected.

And in case anyone is wondering, WotC still has the mailing lists out there.

 

[Ragnar_Lodbrok]

Not only is the new forum terrible, but due to a mass termination of the accounts of myself and several others without good reason (which seems related to the change), it seemed to spark a migration from it.

 

[darjr]

I didn't realize that accounts were terminated. Did they go missing or are they there and just not functional?

 

[Ragnar_Lodbrok]

Entirely nonfunctional. I got a message saying the account had been terminated when I was trying to contact CustServ, and needed to make a sock puppet just to actually ask what had happened. As the response was typical no-content WotC Customer Disservice nonsense, essentially stating that they don't need a reason to terminate accounts, I'm done with them. I'd been putting off migrating away fully for a while anyway.

 

[dd.stevenson]

a mass termination of the accounts of myself and several others without good reason .

Did you notice any pattern in the kinds of accounts that were terminated? (Posting habits, etc.)

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

O.
M.
G.

Visually sucky, loss of function, and I've had to reset my password twice in the past 15 minutes- the second time because it didn't remember the new password.

Did they use an Infinite Number of Macaquerosoft Programmers to launch the new forums?

This does not bode well.