WotC to Shut Down Forums

For those that don't check all the forums, WotC is shutting down all their community forums by 10/28/2015.
http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/news/wizards-coast-community-forums-be-shut-down-2015-09-16
I know that I just check the 4E general discussion forum here, so I hope to get people interested.

Would their be interested in transferring the character optimization guides from 4E over to this forum? To be put in the CharOp subforum. I imagine I can do most of it myself (limited to one guide per class perhaps?), but assistance from other users would be appreciated.

If I knew how to capture that information in the CharOp guides I would definitely get as much as I can. I'm not a big optimizer (I'm typically the DM), but the ideas there are nice to share with my players at least to give them options.

Was any of the Charop Content saved?

Right now I have a 91 MB folder with a bunch of scavenged pages, sans images, that have a great deal of the CharOp pages. The information seems to all be there (at least of the pages I was able to get) but the formatting isn't pretty. Right now, I'm working on a place to put it where it can be accessed by others.

Nice to know

4E is BY FAR my favorite edition of D&D and I plan on running it as long as I can find people willing to play.  One of the reasons I like it so well is because the rules, especially for combat, are very detailed and defined.  With that said, one of the drawbacks I find to having detailed rules is my need to run things “correctly”.  For the most part this isn’t difficult but sometimes situations arise that make me scratch my head.

In the past, if I had a rules question I would search the official WotC forums and with the exception of a few isolated instances, I always found very usable (sometimes official) answers.  Now that their forums are shut down, this is no longer an option.  I’ve tried using Wayback Machine but there doesn’t seem to be a way to search these archives so this isn’t a user-friendly solution.

So, I was wondering if anyone ever compiled a 4E Rules FAQ or the like from the WotC forums?  It’s a shame that most of the information they contained is gone or no longer in a usable (i.e. searchable) form.

Thanks!

Did anything ever come of "place to put it where it can be accessed by others"? My group are starting a new game and we could really use access to the class handbooks in particular. If there's nothing yet, I'd be happy to throw up a simple wiki in my webspace and make things available there - we can worry about proper formatting later!

I have not found a place to put this online. I'm not very good at getting things online. Setting up a wiki would be cool, however, what I have is a folder full of html files that were "scraped" from the various WotC forum posts. So I don't know how that would work. And the process didn't capture any images at all, so there are lots of "broken link" symbols where images should be.

The core data is there, but the formatting is a little off. It would likely take a lot of work to put them up on a forum with all of the appropriate data and whatnot. But if someone wants to tackle this, and can think of a way for me to get a 91MB file to them, I'm happy to share.

skwyd42 wrote:

I have not found a place to put this online. I'm not very good at getting things online. Setting up a wiki would be cool, however, what I have is a folder full of html files that were "scraped" from the various WotC forum posts. So I don't know how that would work. And the process didn't capture any images at all, so there are lots of "broken link" symbols where images should be.

The core data is there, but the formatting is a little off. It would likely take a lot of work to put them up on a forum with all of the appropriate data and whatnot. But if someone wants to tackle this, and can think of a way for me to get a 91MB file to them, I'm happy to share.

is it zipped up... I think you could put it up on google drive.. .they let you put up 5Gig or something like that ..

then share it and post a link here and I could get it...

Okay, try this link. It is a large file in my Google Drive.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B5ImBAHKs1J-aXhZNDVhZk9lZmc

If someone has the ability to get these into the appropriate forum threads there, that would be awesome. Although, I think it would be the right thing to do to put some sort of notice at the beginning of the post that indicates the source and author as well.

skwyd42 wrote:

Okay, try this link. It is a large file in my Google Drive.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B5ImBAHKs1J-aXhZNDVhZk9lZmc

If someone has the ability to get these into the appropriate forum threads there, that would be awesome. Although, I think it would be the right thing to do to put some sort of notice at the beginning of the post that indicates the source and author as well.

ok went to the link and it now has me requesting access... and says it will send me an email when you respond.

I just saw that one and I set it so you can comment. That should allow you to download it. If not, I'll see what other choices I have. I guess I can set it for you to be able to edit the file. Let me know what's up.

Thanks for the response! I've requested access too. I don't have a "smart" way to get the text into new threads or wiki pages, but I do has a super-light wiki framework I can use to make "raw" versions available with a little cut-and-paste. It's not ideal, of course, but probably better than nothing? I can't speak for other groups, but I know in our case we'd rather have sub-par versions available than none at all! <

Yes, I agree. I responded to the request for access. Let me know if it doesn't work!

Having seen the files now, I'm thinking the better way to go is not to try to translate them to a wiki format or anything, but to just to host them as individual html files for now. That will get them available as quickly as possible, which is my priority right now.

So, here's my plan: I'll convert them to single files, strip out as much analytics/import nonsense as I can, replace the stylesheet so they look decent and work properly (collapsible functionality etc.), then put together an index page manually. It shouldn't take too much work, once I know what to search & replace for! And in the mean time, if anybody else has a great idea for how to convert them to threads, they can certainly do that too

Awesome!

One of the things that I hadn't investigated was to see if they had the discussions about the builds in the data as well. I know that some of those original threads had lengthy discussions, some not that nice, as part of them.

In any case, this is great and thanks for working on this!

6447 files gulp...

Put up most of the pages brute force - adjusted a little to have an index page
http://www.dyasdesigns.com/charBuildLinks/

On my own website

That's fantastic! I'll be sure to save that link.

Is this something you would want to share with people who aren't members of these forums?

That would be fine.. encouraging on going use of 4e, is why I posted it.

I was thinking it might be interesting to feature a page from the set periodically on here talk about it a bit an link to it.

I'm going to send the link to my friend that was the main source of know-how and effort to scrape those pages from the forums.

And I also think that having a "talk spot" on one of the pages (maybe one per week) would be very cool. I am pretty much the de facto DM all the time, so I wouldn't be playing any of the characters, but I do know that some of the less experienced players in my group often want suggestions for good feats/powers/items for their characters.

Might do  reformatted presentation of as we do the Talk Spot so we can gradually improve cosmetics and at some level echo/upgrade the content here.