As you might know the old wowironman.com website also had dedicated forums run by Ironlord. Unfortunately, with the demise of the old site, maintenance of the forums also fell by the wayside. We were lucky enough that the forums didn’t get swamped by trolls or spammers, so they’ve been pretty much left unscathed.
As interest in the challenge has seen a resurgence (due mostly to all of you!) it was increasingly a concern of mine that we had zero admins or moderators to step in if needed. I reached out to Ironlord, who responded with transferring admin / ownership of the site to me. I want to give him a HUGE thank you for doing and doing it so quickly.
I’ve made a number of changes to help open up and better organize the forums:
– Guests are now allowed to view / read the forums. They must still register / login in order to post. This was a pet peeve of mine… doing this will open the community up to the greater WoW population. They’ll be able to see tips and tricks, class discussions, strategies and so on without needing to login.
– Class Discussions and Tips & Tricks are now out in the open instead of being buried as sub-boards in the General forum. There is a lot of great information here that needs to be easily accessible.
– Realm discussion boards have been moved into their own category. This is just better for organization.
– There is a new Support & Technical Issues forum for folks to post their issues in. Any outstanding / unresolved issue will be stickied so folks can find it easily and see that I’m aware of the problem.
– I’ve changed the default theme of the forums to a darker colour to be more in-line with the WoWChallenges.com website. Veteran members will still see the old default version, however, they can change their theme by editing their profile.
– There is a new high-contrast theme that I’m hoping will help folks with vision-impairment. This one might be tweaked here and there until we can get it just right.
– All former moderators, global moderators and admins have been demoted to regular users as they haven’t logged in since 2012. Having stagnant accounts in position of authority opens the door for potential hacks and problems down the road. I will eventually be asking folks to help me moderate the forums as things get busier.
– Advertisements are gone. I really despise advertisements in forums… they’re very distracting. I’m paying the Ad-Free fee to ProBoards for the time being.
I’m hoping these changes will make our forums much more open, easier to use, and encourage more folks from the WoW community to participate. If there are any changes, please drop me a message.