As you can see, there has been a substantial merger of forums. The Dragon Article and Dungeon Adventure discussion fora have been merged. It was decided to do so based on the fact that there is a hard limit to the number of new threads in this forum. New threads are only started when new articles/adventures are released. Dragon General and Dungeon General were also merged into the same forum. While the traffic was higher than that of the article discussion forums, it was still low enough that the merger makes sense.
Technical Discussion, D&Di General and D&Di Announcements will remain the same.
There is also a new addition to our litle family of fora: Digital D&D. This forum will be a place to discuss anything having to do with digital D&D offerings. It was decided that there needed to be a place where people could talk about stuf like that. It is not on-topic for the rest of the D&D forums, yet at the same time, it is not really appropriate for the Off Topic forum. When Gleemax was alive, there was a forum for this. Everything from podcasts and Baldur's gate to third-party VTT systems will be at home here.
w00tIn D&D HQ, two new links have been added. One to the VCL Open Discussion forum and one that leads to a bunch of other links that might be useful.
The VCL forum is the place to go to look for discussions concerning the VCL program (and by extension, the NG/FG program). It is also one of the primary places to go if you have a comment, concern, complaint or word of praise for myself or any other VCL/FG/NG. (The other is to directly PM Solice herself.)
The D&D Fundamentals forum has been re-arranged and some of the names changed, to make it clearer what goes where.
The D&D Worlds has been exapanded a bit. What with the FR campaign setting being released (2 of three books are out, or will be soon), the FR have been given three forums of their own. Running the Realms is where you go for discussions on how mechanics in FR work. Realmslore is where to go to find out about the fluff of the FR. And finally, there is Forgotten Realms General for FR stuff that doesn't fit in the other two forums. There is also a link to the Living Forgotten Realms (RPGA) forum.
In preparation for the Eberron Campaign Setting next year, Eberron has been given two forums as well, Eberron Lore and Running Eberron.
And finally, there is a forum called Other Published Worlds. It contains subfora that are dedicated to a whole host of worlds:
Individual magazine forums weren't generating enough traffic to demand their remaining split.
While it's always possible for things to go back, should demand for change be high enough, this plan was in discussion (and heavily advertised by our VCL, mudbunny) for two weeks, and there was little opposition to the idea.
It's strange to me that Dragon and Dungeon article discussion was merged for "traffic" concerns, but then there are a bunch of new subforums about old settings created.
Traffic was not the only concern, just one of them. The new old settings subfora were created because a whole lot of people were complaining that it was very difficult to find discussion for a particular setting in amongst *every* old setting ever published by TSR/WotC. The alternative would have required a great deal of difficulty (reading every thread to determine the one you are interested in) or have everyone tag all of their posts with the world that they are talking bout. It would have been extremely unwieldy and awkward.
Dungeon and Dragon, in the Article Discussion forum, are already indicated inthe subject header whether it is an article from Dragon or an article from Dungeon, so there should be no confusion there. In the general forum, while the subject of discussion may not have the same tagging involved, the subject should make it fairly clear whether the topic will be about something from Dungeon or Dragon.
If the traffic gets high, on the order of 25+ active threads per day for a couple of months, then the merging of the forums may be looked at.
Why exactly is there a dragon and dungeon article forum... and then a seperate dragon and dungeon general discussion? That doesnt make any sense. Why not a dragon everything and a seperate dungeon everything.
Because WotC would like a forum where they can have concentrated discussion about each article. In a number of the article threads, you will find the authors of the article replying and interacting with the posters. It is far easier for them to do that in a forum which has just those articles, than it would be to try to find the article amongst all of the general stuff that gets discussed in the General forum.
I know they're going for the magic web site approach, which I love, but I think the key factor in that set up is that the "discuss this article" link goes directly to that thread on the boards. Just tried the most recent dragon and dungeon articles, and got a 404 and the D&D previous editions board. :/
Which ones are broken? I'll fix them if any of them are my posts.
Which ones are broken? I'll fix them if any of them are my posts.
I am pretty sure that what is being talked about is the links on the Dungeon/Dragon web pages. IIRC, some of the links sent them to forums which no longer exist, rather than threads.