WOTC boards back on-line

Leress · Post by **Leress** » Fri Aug 28, 2009 6:53 am

Well they are back and now they have a beta of their "community" interface.

It really looks like one of those "fan community" sites (the ones that are just advert site for new games).

Kobajagrande · Post by **Kobajagrande** » Fri Aug 28, 2009 8:12 am

Ugh. How irritating. New forum layout sucks, it doesn't have that quick switch button down there, there is no graphic-lite theme, and it even forces you to pick up an avatar. Yeah, that's an important function of a forum. Every member must have an avatar.

Well, now, at least some people may rejoice that the crisis is over, leave these forums and go back to Wotc to penis-touch with other like-minded people there.

Cynic · Post by **Cynic** » Fri Aug 28, 2009 10:28 am

Kobajagrande wrote:Ugh. How irritating. New forum layout sucks, it doesn't have that quick switch button down there, there is no graphic-lite theme, and it even forces you to pick up an avatar. Yeah, that's an important function of a forum. Every member must have an avatar.

Well, now, at least some people may rejoice that the crisis is over, leave these forums and go back to Wotc to penis-touch with other like-minded people there.

fixed. the idea is to brainwash the masses not shove them away.:-D

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Fri Aug 28, 2009 1:39 pm

Kobajagrande wrote:Ugh. How irritating. New forum layout sucks, it doesn't have that quick switch button down there, there is no graphic-lite theme, and it even forces you to pick up an avatar. Yeah, that's an important function of a forum. Every member must have an avatar.

Ah but you forgot one slight thing. It allows you to upload an avatar. Yes I know we take that for granted almost everywhere we go, but this has never happened before (as far as I can racall) in the entire history of TSR/WOTC. "No custom avatar for you; we can't police them" was always their mantra but now no more. I've uploaded my killer icon there, my face as an arrangement of photos of dogs.

The general forum interface looks rather ... how should I put it ... well frankly, it sucks.

Antumbra · Post by **Antumbra** » Fri Aug 28, 2009 3:44 pm

I was on the site yesterday hunting some obscure crap for a limited booklist thing - every single old (BBCode) link is broken. Irritating.
But what the hell - every minute not on their site is a minute gained.

tzor wrote:I've uploaded my killer icon there, my face as an arrangement of photos of dogs.

It's... glorious...

Starmaker · Post by **Starmaker** » Fri Aug 28, 2009 4:37 pm

I set a black square as my pic.
Why are they demanding to specify a gender on a kid-friendly site but still allow "unspecified" as a variant?
Also, I've been there for like 5 minutes and I'm already sick of the blue guy avatars.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Fri Aug 28, 2009 4:49 pm

I approve of the change.

Just another nail in the coffin of 4th Edition.

Doom · Post by **Doom** » Fri Aug 28, 2009 5:26 pm

I know there's a genetic resistance to change, but...damn, that place looks horrible now.

technophile · Post by **technophile** » Fri Aug 28, 2009 5:53 pm

Antumbra wrote:I was on the site yesterday hunting some obscure crap for a limited booklist thing - every single old (BBCode) link is broken. Irritating.

Yeah, any sufficiently complex (i.e. worthwhile) old thread is essentially unreadable with all the formatting tags stuck in there.

If they were going to be too goddamned lazy to run a simple search-and-replace to fix up formatting, they should have just made the old forums read-only and kept them up as an archive.

Korwin · Post by **Korwin** » Fri Aug 28, 2009 5:54 pm

Hah, but one nice feature (?) does it have,
you can drop Wizards off your friend list.

How did it get there?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Aug 28, 2009 6:00 pm

That avatar icon is totally sweet.

-Username17

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Fri Aug 28, 2009 6:50 pm

I totally agree, Frank.

You jokers can't handle my style, so don't even try.

ubernoob · Post by **ubernoob** » Fri Aug 28, 2009 7:02 pm

I'm a pretty girl:

Edit: It works on this board too. I'm totally making that my avatar here too. Rayne's niece is awesome.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Fri Aug 28, 2009 7:41 pm

You know what? I don't want an avatar. It's scary looking at that yuppie douchebag every time I post and realizing that it's me.

If I can ever find that overly-stylized Jojo's Bizarre Adventure Super Mario icon again that I used to have on Nifty I might put one up. But otherwise it doesn't feel right, you know?

ggroy · Post by **ggroy** » Sat Aug 29, 2009 12:18 pm

Titanium Dragon · Post by **Titanium Dragon** » Sun Aug 30, 2009 12:55 am

They hired another company to do their boards for them, and they are, apparently, retards. You'd think that it couldn't be worse than in-house programming, but apparently you'd be wrong.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sun Aug 30, 2009 1:58 am

What was wrong with the old look? I thought that was okay. If they were going to do some weird facebook thing then why did they need to get rid of the parchment look.

Titanium Dragon · Post by **Titanium Dragon** » Sun Aug 30, 2009 2:54 am

Don't ask me. They also got rid of the ability to read the thread you're responding to while writing a response, i.e. basic forum functionality.

I would say you'd think that a professional company which sets up social networking sites couldn't possibly be that incompetent, but their website speaks for itself. Now, maybe its just me but I think their website looks ugly. And is sorely lacking in capital letters.

erik · Post by **erik** » Sun Aug 30, 2009 3:27 am

Wizards actually deleted my old forum ID just a few weeks before the shift, sending me some notice that I hadn't logged in for over a year or somesuch, so I haven't bothered creating an account to try posting and crap. Given that, I am sure I am missing out on some of the functionality flaws like TD described.

It doesn't look *that* bad from what I scrolled through, however having 20 links all piled together in one clusterfuck paragraph and having all the forums on one page that scrolls all the way down to the lower reaches of hell, are definitely some poor site designs.

It will never be as bad as the forum my wife visits from time to time, which is ONE THREAD that lasts oh, maybe 60 thousand pages. It is a pregnant mother + mother with kids support thing. They all feel obligated to reply to everyone who replies to anyone and it just snowballs into some crazy list of gigantic posts to everyone about everything. Add that a bunch of stir crazy housewives are enabled to use html and java in their forum posts, so some of the posts will kill your computer. I have set my bar pretty low for forum standards after seeing that abomination. I was tempted to sign up an ID or two and troll that board, but I'm afraid of what horrible things could happen.

The day that 4chan stumbles upon that site, there will probably be tragedies aplenty.

TOZ · Post by **TOZ** » Sun Aug 30, 2009 4:13 am

I dare you to link them to it.

sake · Post by **sake** » Sun Aug 30, 2009 7:35 am

I'm sure /tg/ knows already, just no one is bored enough to do anything yet.

technophile · Post by **technophile** » Sat Sep 05, 2009 12:19 am

Did they just break all of the old permalinks?

Man, that's fucking helpful.

ubernoob · Post by **ubernoob** » Sat Sep 05, 2009 12:22 am

technophile wrote:Did they just break all of the old permalinks?

Man, that's fucking helpful.

Yes.

Data Vampire · Post by **Data Vampire** » Sat Sep 05, 2009 1:31 am

They changed the code so links with the url tags would work again.
however the post and thread tags will most likely new work with the new board.

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Sat Sep 05, 2009 3:20 am

I wonder if I should see whether the WotC boards still want me to give them more personal information than I find acceptable. I doubt I'd want to post there regularly, but I had one project going redesigning the Eldritch Slayer (3.5 base class), and for courtesy's sake, I should probably either post my latest version or direct them over to the threads here and at the LoZ RPG forum where I have two different versions going (speaking of which, I should probably get around to posting my most recent updates in those threads once I have nothing more pressing to do).

On an entirely tangential note, since some people seem to be inspired to grab new avatars talk about them here, I might as well mention mine. As some of you are probably aware, I like the Legend of Zelda video games. Some of the eye symbols in them make for nice runes in other contexts, and I found a bunch of them converted into .png files during one Google Image search a few years back. I just converted one into a smaller .gif for this board.