mendax.org

A few days ago, Xizang became another World of Warcraft (WoW) blogger to point out the proliferation of Wordpress-based blogs in the WoW blogosphere. This trend has has been the village gossip for a couple weeks, but to us older bloggers, the emigration from Blogger is pure common sense: serious bloggers are going to use a platform that’s customizable, more robust, and independent.

Unlike the aforementioned, correct evolution, however, we’re also seeing a number of WoW blogs adding their own fora, which is an all-around bad idea, and one that I don’t wish to see continue. In many ways, fora are outdated, in that the vast majority of discussion on topics raised on blogs themselves can be addressed with pingbacks and trackbacks. In this manner, RSS feeds deliver content, and comments in these feeds will link to related posts, effectively creating a node-based bulletin board.

A problem with fora is their unnecessary complexity: moderation requires staff, the signal-to-noise ratio is usually horrible, and they cannot be followed easily from mobile devices or without investing considerable browsing time. That’s not to say that fora don’t have a place on the web, though in most all cases, they can better be replaced with Google Groups or a blog network. In cases where a pre-established fora already addresses a theme, additional fora aren’t necessary, because it will only serve to decentralize useful information. For example, for WoW Hunter theorycrafting, we already have Elitist Jerks and TKASomething, which means the new BigRedKitty Forums [sic] are unnecessarily redundant. In fact, the only niche this latter forum fills is to collect known WoW Hunter bloggers in one place, but this could easily have been done on the aforementioned, existing fora as well. While the atmosphere at BigRedKitty’s (BRK’s) place may be less “hardcore”, adding a third theorycrafting blog into the mix will only increase the time necessary to find useful theorycrafting information.

To bloggers Mirshalak and Pelides, don’t worry if your fora aren’t successful. You’re better off creating an account at an existing forum, because it will mean less work/responsibility, and an easier method to engross yourself in theorycrafting discussion. Vanity fora serve no real purpose other than to take up bandwidth and setup time. BRK’s forum has shown initial success, and it’s served to bring Hunter bloggers together, so let’s be content with that and move forward. In the meantime, know that we’re still subscribing to your RSS feeds, and that’s where the real content comes from anyway.

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