Lotro Forum changes

From sapience:

LOTRO Community Site Revamp July 28 - Aug 1, 2013 - ESTIMATED

    On Monday July 29 at 10AM Eastern time, the LOTRO Forums will be placed into read only mode and a forum, “Temporary Discussions” will be created for each of our supported languages (English, German, and French). Posts in these forums will not be saved or copied to the new forum. It is only being created so that players can continue to interact with us and each other during the maintenance. We encourage everyone to follow us on Twitter or like us on Facebook to keep up to date as we will be posting updates and status changes there. If there are issues during the deployment our social media channels may be the only means available to us to update you. We currently expect the migration to take up to 4 days to complete.

    What is staying and being improved:

    Official Forums
    The forums will be upgraded to a newer version of VBulletin. Changes will include:

        The forum styling/appearance will be updated and will now scale to the full width of your browser window.
        A new “Community Digest” page that will have links to lotteries, forums, and updated news.
        The reputation system will be discontinued.
        Forum performance will be improved.
        Forums should perform better on mobile devices.



    LOTRO Lotteries
    The lottery widget is going away and a new Lottery page is taking its place. Several small changes have been made that should make it easier to see which lotteries you are eligible for, which you have entered, and your winnings after the fact. You should also now be able to see all lotteries, even if your character cannot enter them. The “no lottery” message should also now correctly state there are no lotteries running if there are no active lotteries.

    Character Copy for Bullroarer and Beta.
    The character copy system we use for Bullroarer and beta testing will be improved and easier to use.


    The following features are being discontinued:

        The LOTRO Lorebook
        Player Blogs
        PvMP leaderboards
        Skirmish Leaderboards
        Character and Kinship Data and Pages
        Referrals
        Signup Rewards
        Item Icons / Tooltips
        Signature System

It is also worth noting that the data.lotro.com function will also be discontinued.
This is the data stream that provides websites and other services with information on characters etc.

As some of you know our website automatically updates the level and other details of your characters once you add them to your account.

As of tomorrow, this will no longer be possible and all members will have to return to manually adjusting the level and other information of their characters via the character panel.
it is unfortunate but there is nothing we can do about it.

They are shutting off all access to data servers... and getting rid of all leader boards? Sounds like they plan to stop the game at lvl 85/95 and sell it (or take it down completely?)

They are shutting off all access to data servers... and getting rid of all leader boards? Sounds like they plan to stop the game at lvl 85/95 and sell it (or take it down completely?)

Not necessarily... it's been a feature that's been working intermittently at best. Updates have regularly stopped for sometimes up to 3 months. Crafting info is notoriously out of date and kinships created in the Codemasters era still don't exist as far as the system is concerned. It's more like they're taking down a non-essential feature they don't have the capacity for to properly support and that's currently holding back necessary updates to more essential systems (the forum & lotteries).

_________________________________________
Ingaras, Hunter (75)
Indo, Minstrel (81)
Celefindel, Loremaster (115)
Magolisto, Champion (75)

and some others...

the temporary servers count:
English - 44 threads 514 posts
German - 1 thread 8 posts
French - 1 thread 6 posts
Does this mean that the majority of lotro player base is English/american or that English/american like to complain more?

Well I think Thor made a point in a certain thread in there  8)