Posts with tag new forums

Blizzard has added three new categories on its official WoW forums. You can't see them from the main forum list, but they are available if you go to the drop-down menu in any specific forum. The new forums are:

• A Welcome to WoW forum, for experienced players to help new players out with the game
• A Guide Forum, for people who have created leveling/profession/dungeon guides
• A Battlegroup Discussion forum, for people in PVP battlegroups to discuss PVP.

Personally, I'm looking forward to the growth of the Guide Forum, because people have made some pretty neat guides out there and it might come in handy when TBC hits. The Battlegroup Discussion forum will help clear up all those "Your team sucks! Our team beat your team! You are cheaters" threads from realm forums -- I hope. I do wish they had put in the oft-requested lore forum ... maybe someday.

Do you have any suggestions for new WoW forums?

I don't know about you, but I hate the World of Warcraft forums. Popular threads eventually break, meaning you can no longer browse through them (though people can keep posting to them), lending to the potential loss of much useful information (or much useless spam - but it's hard to tell!). Needed information is impossible to find due to a very poorly implemented search feature (perhaps it worked once upon a time, before the forums got so big). And I could go on! But at any rate, this is why I'm glad to see the new forums that Blizzard has been beta testing. And the beta testing period is now closed, meaning the forums should be released for general use soon. To that I can only say... yay!

Remember the new forum system Blizzard's been testing? Well, tomorrow they're going to be running a stress test of the new forums - by making the existing forums read-only for the duration of the test. So tomorrow afternoon, all of the action you'd usually see at forums.worldofwarcraft.com will be relocated to beta.worldofwarcraft.com. So let's see if the new forums system is any better than the old - be sure to run over and post, reply, or just spend some time reading the beta forums.

While the shiny new beta forums are up and running, the old forums - with all their sticky posts and archived information - are offline.  Drysc claims they're offline due to an unrelated issue and should be coming back, though the continued downtime is the longest in recent memory (starting late Thursday night).  In the mean-time, conspiracy theorists speculate that the old forums have been pulled down to force players to test the new forums.  However, while we're waiting for the old forums to rise from the dead, the beta forums do provide a source of entertainment, and in some cases information, as the same questions get asked and answered.

Blizzard has unveiled a new version of their forum software, with a lot more sparkle than the previous version.  While it's unclear as to what new hardware or software supports these forums, their intent is to provide a more stable and robust forum system for us all.  One thing that stands out is the new search function, which, while still quirky, is far and away an improvement on the former search function.  So check them out, and let Blizzard know what you think of the changes.

[Fan art by Sarah Jaffe]