BIG changes to Lorebook, MyLOTRO, Forums and data.lotro.com

[magill]

Posted Wednesday 24 April 2013 by Sapience):
* [http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.p...ms-and-MyLOTRO Important changes coming to the LOTRO Forums and MyLOTRO]

Originally Posted by Sapience

Soon we will be making several significant changes and updates to the LOTRO community websites. Some features of the existing community site will be upgraded, while others will be discontinued.


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

• The forum styling/appearance will be updated.
• We will be adding a new forum home page that includes forum category navigation and feeds of recent turbine announcements/recent player discussions.
• The reputation system will be discontinued.
• Forum performance will be improved.
• The forum layout and the number of forums will be streamlined to reduce the number of forums and sub-forums.
• Our bug reporting system is being revamped. We will update the bug reporting links as soon as the new system is available.

Lorebook
The LOTRO Lorebook will be discontinued. Official Guides will be relocated to LOTRO.Com website. If you have created a guide and wish to save it, please copy it from the lorebook in the next few days. We will be creating a new “Player Created Guides” forum for you to post your guides in.

MyLOTRO
Several MyLOTRO components will be moving to LOTRO.com or retiring. Details are as follows:

• The current player blog functionality will be discontinued. We are investigating ways of bringing blogging to players in the community site, but in the meantime existing player blogs can be exported for use at a later time. Exporting your blog will create an XML file containing all your blog entries, comments, and images, which can be imported into a variety of blogging platforms.
• Character and guild data will be discontinued. Please note that this will also impact any systems that rely on character data including PVMP leaderboards, Character Signatures, and API functionality (data.lotro.com).
• The Character Copy tool is being revamped and migrated to LOTRO.com.
• The LOTRO referral system is being revamped and migrated to LOTRO.com. Please note that if you currently have active referrals, you will continue to accrue bonus points from your existing referrals, but you will be unable to redeem bonus points from your referral wallet or add new referrals until the new front-end of the referral system is launched.

LOTRO Lotteries
The LOTRO Lotteries will receive a slight refresh and a new widget that should make them easier to find and enter. Our current expectation is the new system will be available with the launch of the new community site.

Post #6
ETA -- mid-May, possibly later in the month.

Post #12
Q: No API is disappointing. I assume that includes the item data. Not that the item data was 90% accurate or up to date at all. But this totally kills most third-party tools.
Q: ust a quick question: considering that the Lottery system will go on (and that we can therefore suppose that the tech behind the characters data gathering will be still on), can we expect (possibly not at the relaese, but later) that we get the character data back (even if only as xml like in data.lotro.com)?
A: These are sort of related. The data will still be there for some time, but it will not be supported or updated and will eventually be disabled. So anything, in terms of third party apps, that work now will continue to work as they do now until such time as it's finally disabled completely.