I know everyone, its scary! The website has changed, and more than ever before but do not fear, you can find all the information on what’s changed and why its changed right here. As many of you have seen the website has been running to full capacity and over, this has caused the website to breach its bandwidth limit the past 2 months meaning the site goes down, completely. This was no good and action needed to be taken. Originally the plan was for a simple transfer of what we currently had however problems arose with that option making me look for a different approach.

After a whole lot of messing around I decided screw it, I am going to rebuild the system from the ground up, this is the result of that. The website is now run by 2 open source softwares that integrate together to give a seamless experience to the users. The new set-up is also simplified to avoid pointless bloat to the databases and has little used functions stripped out.

There are various changes that will make using the website different from before, as to not cause confusion I have listed the major differences below:

Stale Users
All users that had not made any posts in the past have been removed. There were over 96,000 users registered that had not activated or posted and have now been removed. If you are one of these please recreate your account via the forums.

Passwords
This is an important one, right now you wont be able to log in! Don’t worry though, all the user information has been transferred over, the only problem is the new system uses a different type of encryption than the old so you have to reset your password, this is dead easy. Simply go to the forums and click on the “lost password?” link and enter your username, you will then get an email telling you what to do. When you reset your password the system will make one for you, these can be stupidly complex and they can be manually changed via your profile on the forums if desired.

Avatars
You will notice that the avatar system is different and you would be right, the avatars are now run by a system called “Gravatar” which are global avatars. To set yours up please visit www.gravatar.com, its very simple and only takes 2 minutes.

Blogs
There is a brand new blog system added to the website. This is so users can create interesting WoW related articles that the rest of the world will want to see. They will then be published on the website and broadcast for the world to see! If you would like to contribute some posts or just like some more information on how it works get in touch!

Features that have been retired
There were various features in the old system that have been removed and will no longer be available. Notable removals are Polls, Private Messages and Post Counts. Some of these features may be worked back into the system in future but for now they have been removed.

Errors and Bugs
As there has been a lot of data matching from the databases taking place there were bound to be some errors. So far I can only see one consistent problem that effects old posts with “0” replies. These topics no longer allow replies to be added, I am looking into this bug but cannot guarantee a fix. I also stumbled upon a “phantom post” bug where a post appeared out of nowhere however I have not been able to replicate it since so things should be good. Of course if you do notice anything strange please let me know.

Other than that the site is ready to use and be enjoyed by all. As always if you have any suggestions, comments or questions please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me!