I think that Blizzard just needed to take a more active approach to community management. The add-on forums have always been good because the developers in charge of UI have either spoken directly or through community members to the community.

The other forums are generally a mess because people tend to troll more when they feel ignored. One of the best things Blizzard has done recently is to have Ghostcrawler write a blog every so often in order to focus the community on legitimate discussions. Imo, that's the one thing that Blizzard has always failed at ... actively engaging the online community. Managing a good community is more about being active, creating fun topics, forums games, etc and less about moderation.

In the end, the success of online forums have basically boiled down to who has the largest number of members, posts and replies. Those success metrics need to be adjusted before Blizzard's forums and forums in general can improve. Success to me is the quality of the posts rather than the quantity. Every time I see a forum filled with trolling, I know that a company just gave up on managing their community.

Reply