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[Ghills]

https://forum.bioware.com/topic/574907-concerning-our-forums/

TL;DR
So it is with a heavy heart that we will close our public forums on August 26, 2016. We will maintain some private boards, and may use these in future for beta feedback or other special projects. Because we know there is a lot of information on there you may want to keep, the public boards will remain in a read-only state until October 25, 2016. After that date, they will be taken down.

Bioware forums shutting down starting tomorrow. All forum content will disappear by mid-October, though mods will stick around for some time afterwrad.  There are efforts to get mods and the forums transferred elsewhere - forum transfer is going OK, but mods are difficult because people can't just scrape and upload them elsewhere.

UDPATE: Mods AKA Projects will hang around for an indefinite amount of time after October. This information was posted in one of the threads by a Bioware person on the Bioware boards, so take it for what it's worth.
Dragon Age Keep and save transfer between games should still work: https://forum.bioware.com/topic/575034-will-the-keep-still-be-accessible-once-bsn-closes-for-good/

People are collaborating in these threads/sites:
https://whereisbioware.wordpress.com/
https://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/4716405-bsn-is-shutting-down;-files-there-could-be-lost/
Old, deprecated thread: https://forum.bioware.com/topic/575012-unofficial-bioware-community-rescue-team-collaboration/

Mod Transfer central, run by NexusMods:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IUesp-Hk6qgiPpwHbyX6o_70ZkHhHLuJLqNG3qZFiRY/edit?pref=2&pli=1#gid=0

New Forums:
http://fextralife.com/forums/f95/
http://bsn.boards.net/
http://www.princessstabbity.com/all-news-posts/bioware-forum-shutdown-life-rafts-are-available - has a list of other forums

[Xantalos]

Huh. That ... doesn't really make sense.

Sucks for losing the mods, I was just about to get back into Dragon Age.

[Ghills]

Huh. That ... doesn't really make sense.

Sucks for losing the mods, I was just about to get back into Dragon Age.

Yeah, it's incredibly weird, and super fast. The only thing I can think is that the SW MMO isn't the cash cow EA thought it would be and they don't want to pay hosting costs anymore.


It would be great if you could use the Mod Transfer google doc and start contacting mod authors. 

There's already many DAO mods on Nexus, ModDB, etc, so it's not like there won't be any way to get DA mods.  But there's lots that aren't, so it's good to make sure mod authors know what's happening and can transfer their stuff.  ME and NWN are really going to hurt for mods as I understand it.

ETA: Just found out that Bioware has decided to keep mods around for a while past Oct 25, but they're not saying how long past that.

[Mattk50]

Knowing bioware its probably because they cant handle having a community without freaking out. Never forget ding dong bannu.

[scriver]

It's hard to forget something you've never heard of.

[Aklyon]

It's hard to forget something you've never heard of.

I'm assuming it has to do with bad moderators.

[Mattk50]

It's hard to forget something you've never heard of.

Indeed it is.

[Shadowlord]

That was... not particularly enlightening.

[Virtz]

So... is this EA releasing its digestive enzymes, or are they really thinking social media are the best way to maintain a community?

[Aklyon]

are they really thinking social media are the best way to maintain a community?

Its technically better than news articles that claim removing comments sections builds community.
This does not actually make it a good plan.

[Virtz]

Might still happen, especially with game fanboys (and we are talking about Bioware here). Like technically it's up to random chance whether some fan created Reddit or Tumblr is gonna have better or worse moderation, except it's now not up to them. I guess they just don't care tho, and now they can say "hey, it's not us doing the bad moderating!".

[scriver]

Is social media "communities" become a fad? I know WotC also removed all their forums and the like some time ago with "something something social media something modern" as reasoning.

[Cheeetar]

It's hard to forget something you've never heard of.

Indeed it is.

Way to be constructive and comprehensible, friend.

[chaoticag]

Is social media "communities" become a fad? I know WotC also removed all their forums and the like some time ago with "something something social media something modern" as reasoning.

Business and outreach reasons usually. You generally reach less people on official forums nowadays than through social media. For a forum, you not only need to have a community manager but also moderators. Meanwhile, you're better off reaching one of the devs and interacting with them on twitter and/or tumblr compared to their forums in all likelihood, and reddit, tumblr and twitter double up as potential advertising. At the same time you just got tohave the community manager pop in those places and they typically provide their own moderators. Then you have Nexus mods and basically the only reason to have a forum anymore is for the MMO community they still have, as it's their one business that turns in a bigger gross the longer the player is in it compared to one time purchases for games.

tl;dr it's just cheaper to not have forums and more effective to swap community managers to social media.

[Mattk50]

It's hard to forget something you've never heard of.

Indeed it is.

Way to be constructive and comprehensible, friend.

If you wanted to know more you could have used google on the words in my post. Since you dont seem to be any good at that/want me to indulge your laziness, i'll just give the short version.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

After hyping up The Old Republic, Bioware released trash instead, removed the unsubscribe button from their website to force people to talk to their support to stop giving them money and their forum turned out about as well as you'd expect.

"From horrible bugs, to nazi-like forum and chat mods, to banning people trying to cancel subscriptions, to the gameplay simply being bad, it was an all-around disaster."

Ding dong bannu was a parody of a post made by one of their most zealous mods at the time. The name TORtanic is a reference to the titanic sinking.