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New Blizzard community website, forums begin testing in November

Gregg Reece
Contributing Editor
Updated ·3 min read

The announcement came out this morning on the EU forums that Blizzard is getting ready to roll out its new community website and forums for World of Warcraft some time in early November. Anyone who has been to the community site for StarCraft 2 will already be aware of some of the new features including a more advanced forum system than what we have now. Features will include the ability to report a post for trolling or spam without changing pages, being able to see a quick summary of the thread by mousing over and letting players up- and down-rate responses.

The current forums will be set as locked during the beginning of the transition and then will be completely removed toward the end. This means that if there are any old guides, posts or fun things from days of old that you want to see moved to the new forums, you should copy them to your own computer now.

One thing that is curiously missing from the announcement is what alternative Blizzard has developed to its original Real ID forums concept since it was thrown out. StarCraft 2 has a centralized handle that is associated with your Battle.net login, and it is the same handle/avatar that's used for multiplayer games. Hopefully, they'll provide more details on issues like this as things start to lead up to the changeover.

The full blue post is after the break.



Takralus
Azeroth isn't the only landscape that's changing. In preparation for the upcoming launch of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, we'll soon be releasing our new World of Warcraft community site which will provide players with a host of new features including blog posts, a robust game guide, and brand-new forums! If you want an idea of how this new site will look and operate, head on over to our StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty community site (http://eu.battle.net/sc2/en/).

We currently plan to launch a live preview version of the new World of Warcraft community site sometime in early November, and will begin to transition over to the new forum system at that time. To make this transition as smooth as possible, we want to provide a tentative timeline for how we'll be phasing posting access from these forums (the ones on which you're currently posting) to the new forums.
As we get closer to the release of the new community site, we'll be sure to provide you with more information. In the meantime, we're making preparations to ensure that important announcements posted by Blizzard Entertainment will be available in the new forums, and we encourage you to do the same. If there are any beloved discussions or guides that you want to take with to you , be sure to start saving them now!

  • For approximately two weeks after the preview site is released, both sets of forums will be open for posting. The requirements for posting on the new forums will be the same as posting here: you will need an active World of Warcraft account that's in good standing and a compatible browser.

  • Following the initial testing phase of the new community site, all forums located at http://forums.wow-europe.com will be marked as Read Only. While you will still be able to access these forums, you will no longer be able to create new posts or edit existing ones.

    (The World of Warcraft: Cataclysm beta forums will remain available for posting until further notice. In order to post on the beta forums, you will need to possess a World of Warcraft: Cataclysm beta account.)

  • The current forum system will be completely removed sometime in November to complete the transition to the new community site. All forum communication at that time, excluding that conducted on the World of Warcraft: Cataclysm beta forums, will move to the new forums.