Posts with tag fansite

Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Holisky be your host today.

Today has to have some special significance. If you take the month and the year and add them together and subtract 2000 you get the day. The day. It's like, the world is going to end or something, and it isn't even 2012!

Oh well, here are the last questions I'll ever answer in The Queue, because it's the end of the world as we know it (which happens to be today's reading music).

Rhornez asked...

"Why are warriors so awesome?"

Our good friends at BlizzPlanet have obtained a ticket to the happiest place on Earth (BlizzCon, of course -- right next to some dump called Disneyland), and they're giving it away over on their site. There are a few hoops to jump through, but then again, how much do you want to go to BlizzCon? They will have you hunting around their archives for a few things, running over to the Mountain Dew website to earn some points and take a screenshot, and even checking out some comic books over at DC (their contest is probably part of the official fansite program, which would explain why you'll be visiting lots of Blizzard's licensing partners).

Do all that stuff by June 9th, and be one of the lucky winners, and you'll pick yourself up one of three shiny tickets to Blizzard's big event in Anaheim. It looks like airfare and hotel might be on your own, but no worries -- you can eBay the goodie bag stuff and use that money to put yourself up in Anaheim for both nights. Everybody wins! Good luck -- if you end up being chosen as the winner, be sure to come say hi to us while you're there.

April Fools.

I like it and I don't.

It can sometimes be hard to distinguish between real news and fake news, especially with some of the elaborate schemes people do in order to make the fake stuff seem as real as possible. And there's a lot of it too. Google and Blizzard win the day, as usual. C.A.D.I.E anyone? The page is a throwback to the 1990s Geocities pages many of us made back then. My Geocities site had to do with Star Trek and lots of other nerdy stuff, although someone on staff had a Digimon site (I'm not telling who...).

After the break you can check out our list of all the April Fools jokes that went on yesterday that pertained to WoW. And for posterity's sake we've taken as many snapshots of the pages as we could and put them in a nice gallery so 10 years from now we can all look back and go "Aww... isn't that... /facepalm."

Sad news on the druid blogger front. Phaelia of Resto4Life fame will be closing her doors on March 19th.

Resto4Life is, in many people's opinions, is one of the best Druid healing blogs out there. Phaelia is one helluva intelligent resto druid, and a funny blogger to boot.

Phaelia posts that she's ending her bloging for a number of reasons, chiefly among them is that there is a new baby tree that her and Mr. Phae are expecting. So despite our sadness at seeing her go, there couldn't be a better reason!

The community over at Resto4Life is really quite a good one, and as such Phaelia is going to make a final post in March comprised of all the reader submitted screenshots and artwork she gets. And to add to the coolness of it, she's randomly awarding a Belkin Nostromo Speedpad N52TE to someone who submits some artwork, purchased with the money she's made from the site.

Class act all around, and a great site that will be missed.

I can't quite see the purpose of World of Warcraft (or gaming in general) flavored dating sites -- if you were looking for a potential partner, why limit yourself to only people that play this game? But nevertheless, there are quite a few of them around, so someone must be using them. Datecraft is a site that was specifically targeted World of Warcraft bachelors and bachelorettes -- at least until this past week, when Blizzard hit them up with a C&D.

Well, not actually -- they only got threatened with one. We heard from the site's founders, and they tell us that they got a call from Rod Rigole, a VP of Legal Affairs over at Blizzard, who told them to cut out using Blizzard's artwork and terminology on their website was a no-no, and that they would be recieving legal papers soon. Rather than pick a fight, they instead redesigned to the standard gamer dating site you see today.

But here's the kicker: they used an official fansite kit to actually make the site. Even with the stuff they give out, Blizzard seems extremely protective of their artistic IP -- they used this same technique to attack the WotLK wiki and the Glider folks as well. They'll let fans slide, it seems, but if you're making money off of their materials, beware.

Those of you who have been around for a little while will no doubt know about one of the most useful resources in this World of Warcraft: WoWWiki. If you're new to the party, let me tell you about it. WoWWiki is, as the name suggests, a wiki about all things Warcraft. From boss strategies to patch history to insanely detailed lore, if it's about the Warcraft series, it's probably on there somewhere. And if not, it's a wiki, so you can write it yourself!

The occasion for this particular post is that they have just completed some major upgrades to their software and infrastructure. Here are the highlights:

• WoWWiki is now hosted in a distributed fashion across the Wikia network, which should mean more stability and less chance of catastrophic failure.
• A new default skin, which looks nice and classy.
• The OpenSearch plugin is now working again, so you can add WoWWiki as a search engine in Firefox or IE (though I still prefer Firefox's search keywords). Click on the menu by your search field while browsing WoWWiki to check it out.
• A proper sidebar menu, with links to important parts of the site. This fixes my single biggest complaint about the site, which is that it was hard to navigate.
• The sidebar is also now customizable; users can pick which widgets they want to see over there, and in what order. This is very cool.
• A new version of MediaWiki, which brings many feature improvements and bug fixes.

Head on over and check it out! And thanks to Kirkburn and everyone else who has helped make WoWWiki such a fantastic site.