Ending or Expanding Online Communities? (WotC Forums Being Shut Down)

http://dnd.wizards.com/articles/news...

The Community Forums will be shut down on October 29. Thanks to all who participated over the years!

Choosing to retire a former foundation of our community was not an easy decision, but we feel that we must adjust our communications structure to reflect where conversations about Wizards of the Coast games are taking place.

Social media has changed significantly over the last ten years, and discussions about games aren't exclusive to company-hosted forums. The majority of community conversation takes place on third-party websites (such as Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and many other fantastic community-run websites), and it is up to us to evolve alongside our players.

We encourage past and current users to retrieve any information you want to retain from the Community Forums for both Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering. The shutdown will occur on October 29, 2015, at 10:00 a.m. PT. We want to provide enough time for our forum members to move their content, and we recognize that given our forum's vibrant user base and extensive history, this may take time. Any information still on the forums on the cut-off date will be deleted.

Thank you to all of our past and current forum users. You helped build our community into what it is now, and we look forward to continuing to interact with you on our many active social platforms.

So, most of the WotC forums (and the reddit DnD sub) are losing their minds over this. The above essentially feels like "well, Facebook and Twitter exist, so why bother?" which really bugs me in a way I don't know if I can express correctly.

Gaming communities are not really physically defined locations. Your playgroup, forum, online chatgroup, whatever, do not live in the same neighborhood. But it is still a community, and that community still has a conceptual "location" - in this case, the WotC forums. I think there's something to the idea that if you want to be part of that niche community, you have to go out of your way a little bit to participate. I don't think much of the idea of shifting the main company-sponsored discussion out to platforms like Facebook and Twitter for that reason and also for the reason that it encourages lazy moderation by the company. Moderating a forum sponsored by the company is a matter of pride and accountability, really. Whereas 1) it's easier for people not invested in the community to jump onto the Facebook page and crap it up, and 2) There's just way more people to moderate and more of an urge not to bother.

I mean, it essentially feels like "yo we're just gonna let you all be awful and stop engaging meaningfully online". Which, to be honest, doesn't seem like a losing proposition from the corporate side. What has more communication/transparency gotten us with gaming/production companies? Things just seem to get weirdly personal and consumers feel like every single voice should now be heard individually and given special attention.

I just don't even know where to go with this, I'm at once irritated with the choice but also see it as a logical pushback from the extremely porous communication social media has given consumers and companies.

Bloo Driver wrote:

I just don't even know where to go with this, I'm at once irritated with the choice but also see it as a logical pushback from the extremely porous communication social media has given consumers and companies.

It's all GardenNinja's fault. She's mean.

I think it's just the March of time/progress than laziness. I remember when WotC finally killed their mailing list servers which predates their forums.

Although I guess it could also be laziness. That's one less thing they need to worry about with engaging with their customers and paying people or recruiting volunteers to maintain and moderate it. And if social media (or Reddit which is basically an ad-hoc forum in the case of many subreddits) is where the audience is, that's probably where they want to focus their attention. Especially because forums are also a lot more internally facing for a community than say social media.

Communities are odd things.

I'd be curious to see the numbers on how much it was taking for WotC to maintain / moderate / update their forums. If they were overdue for a redesign, I could see that being the impetus to try to direct discussions through mediums which require less effort to maintain.

But of course, in addition to the more-easily-denominated costs, there are benefits which can be harder to put a specific dollar amount on. How valuable is having a positive, engaged community on your official forums? If they're seeing a traffic drop-off on the official forums, but still see conversations happening elsewhere, is it a better use of their time to try to lure people back or to simply join the conversations where they're already happening?

Moderating communities well is hard. I often disagree with Certis' moderatorial choices, but it's clear that his laissez-faire approach has resulted in a thriving community I'm happy to be a part of - though even then, it's still a community that I frequently interact with outside of the forums as well (primarily on IRC or Twitter).

shoptroll wrote:

I think it's just the March of time/progress than laziness. I remember when WotC finally killed their mailing list servers which predates their forums.

I dunno if this is the same as moving away from mailing lists, though. Forums and Facebook posts are more similar than listservs and forums.

I think a lot of this is probably also due to places like ENWorld.org and elsewhere providing the same kind of feedback / community WotC is looking for without having to provide the space / moderation themselves. Not just Facebook / Twitter / Reddit / Etc. but straight up forums that are serving the exact same community already.

I think saving the cost of moderation--either salary + benefits of employees, or wrangling costs + litigatory exposure with volunteers--is foremost in Hasbro's calculus.

As has been pointed out, a thriving online archipelago of communities exists around D&D. Wherever WotC decides to throw scraps to the faithful, the rest of the cargo cultists will hear about it. One-to-many broadcasts over social media can provide examples that they have Listened to the Fans™. They get all the benefits of community without having to referee the poo-flinging of Edition Wars.