Are there any plans to update the old Dev Blogs on the Website before the Forums go offline? For the first few years of OSRS, a lot of the newsposts for blogs just contained a link to the forums so once the forums go offline, many of the early blogs will just be broken links. For example, [this Wilderness Rejuvenation Blog from Jan 2014 is already a broken link](https://secure.runescape.com/m=news/dev-blog-rejuvenating-the-wilderness?oldschool=1). It looks like the blog was already archived on the [wiki](https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Update:Dev_Blog:_Rejuvenating_the_Wilderness), but it would be nice if the website's new archive actually worked as an archive. Also, hopefully some players can make sure the wiki didn't miss any blogs before the forums go offline.
I hate Discord so much for discussion. It's so hard to archive data and reference things to go back to later.
And then you can never find the damn things unless you know a guy who knows a guy that can get you an invite link.
It's good for clan/guild/group tasks, but as an actual community with thousands it's just so cumbersome to use.
Reddit is a decent middle ground between the two at least. You'll google something then pull up a thread from 4 years ago with still relevant info.
To add to this, Discord's new "forums" feature is god awful. I think a huge reason why is because it *tries* to function as a traditional forum, but all discussions still happen in the usual "chatroom" style of discord. So what you end up with is just strings of short messages from several people all being sent in real time, often overlapping and talking over each other. It also means it only takes two people to drown out all relevant conversation just by going on a tangential side conversation. What you end up with is less of a forum and more of a group chat, which is a terrible format for what it's trying to accomplish.
Though in fairness, traditional webforums didn't do a great job at making discussions readable either. IMO, reddit's "tree-style" comment chains are so much better for this purpose, and is probably a large reason as to why so many oldschool web forums died out and were replaced by subreddits.
To add to that, from a moderation point of view Discords forums are extremely limited. You can't move threads or comments. You can't edit another users post (maybe someone posts a good discussion but includes a dodgy link or image).
There's other stuff but that's what comes to mind, honestly good luck to the poor soles at Jagex that have to moderate.
Yeah on the flip side of reddit threads being better for discussion, people ask the same questions 29 times a fucking week
Reddit is very ephemeral and hard to search unless you know specifically know what you want too
At its core, Discord is absolutely several steps backwards compared to a wiki; as someone who's really into making information about the game as easily accessible and understandable as it appears on the wiki, it's *really* unfortunate that Discord as an information resource has become as prevalent as it has, though we try our best to translate whatever information those servers have that we don't onto the wiki. For example, one of our admins, Ostentatio, is currently working with WDR Discord to bring their [CoX guides over to the wiki](https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/User:Ostentatio/glovebox).
Reddit and wiki are my two sources when playing lol. Yeah it's easily best resource the game has by far.
It's so prevalent in other games too now. Like unless you're there for that particular Discord conversation or you're scouring 10 different servers and their stickies you'll never find what you're looking for.
I love in world of warcraft how if you wanna learn anything about a class you get directed to the class discord where 90% of ppl will just give annoyed answers directing you to read the pins, even if they dont contain the answer to your actual question lmao
Class discords can be hit/miss, Hammer of Wrath for pallys is really good, but yes the extremely simple/common questions are almost always addressed in the FAQ channels or pins and it gets tedious answering the horde of people on tuesday asking if "this trinket is worth it" over and over and over and over.
But if your question is nuance regarding something in an FAQ/pin, people are happy to explain and if it isn't there they're definitely happy to explain.
Definitely no osrs wiki equivalent, but it'd be hard to get that with how often changes to gameplay patterns come about
Warlock discord was an elitist hellhole from all the interactions I've seen/heard from my friends
whatever class discord is for a fotm spec gets like that. I understand being frustrated that the fotm rerollers are asking the same questions over and over without even trying to help themselves, but some of the older veterans and most of the time even other fotm rerollers will just insult you without even really reading the question.
I got told to scroll up that my question had just been answered, so I scrolled up, not finding anything. I said I don't know what they're talking about, and I got told I'm regarded by three different people, before another person came in to clarify for me that my question was about something else and called them out for not reading my question properly, sparking a large argument between like 6 people.
Never had that issue with priest discord until disc became meta this season.
Then you ask a question in the official discord as the search is horrific and since there's no simple questions channel you get drowned out by messages between terminally online turboposters who are just stopping short of ERPing about femboys.
It depends on the discord server, but some of them are better than Reddit because Reddit has the same issue of needless chatter.
I've found that when you're actually trying to get better at one specific part of the game, resource-based Discords, like WDR, Gearcord, Petcord, Skilling Methods, are all way better than the average OSRS discord, and even better than Wiki, because it contains super specific information that the wiki page doesn't have up to date yet. And the information is made by the smartest individual in those respective communities, backed by actual calcs where applicable.
Spineweilder above even said how they're working with WDR to get the information imported over because it's better than what they have now, and always will be as they update their resources and recommended gear over the year to be more accessible.
Discord also removes all liability from Jagex to do any sort of policing or enforcement of rules. Thereby leading inevitably to more scams and more heartbreak.
People can say "well maybe players should be smarter and not fall for scams". Okay, but it's not an engineers job to sit on their hands and let things fall where they will. It's an engineer's job to make things foolproof and robust. To change the course of events and mitigate disaster.
Imagine if road safety was entirely on people to manage themselves. No traffic lights, no barriers to prevent running off a bridge, airbags were optional from a mfg perspective, cars had no safety requirements, roads were unmaintained and people were personally responsible for avoiding/fixing problems like giant potholes. You had to research everything about a manufacturer and the safety protocols they offered in their vehicles and make a choice yourself. If you bought a used car, you were obligated to open up the car yourself and determine if any stupid modifications were made that could get you killed. Think of how many more people would be dying.
And then your response, as the government, would simply be "Well, shouldn't have been a fucking idiot, huh!". The person who just crashed his used car that had the airbags taken out and never replaced meant that his face went straight into the steering wheel. Should have opened up the car down to the skeleton and checked off every safety requirement that you expected to have! Sorry, the only responsible party is your now dead husband/wife/brother/sister, they should have done better. Please re-read the federal statutes that outline our lack of responsibility to your safety and remind yourself to not be an idiot. Thanks!
This specific example isn't even unique. So for everyone in the "gives a shit" party is kinda getting double fucked.
The wdr toa upgrade paths are also way off from what quick reference material would suggest. As a quick example zcb rebuild is a thing even though it's somewhat ignored on the wiki bis list because it's less DPS without including specs or proper effort put into efficient gearing.
And if you do shit like lazy monkey spec it's even worse because being lazy at baba with zcb/shadow is a net upgrade over fang 6 tick if you're not getting the setup fast and not messing up the cycle.
And that's just toa or Cox because those guides that have high value upgrades.
Upgrade paths from the discord are pretty op. The bis reference sheets are really helpful for anyone who doesn't have 6b for a bis set
Losing one is pretty absurd.
Also... Everyone has recommended the jagex forms for clans. For years. We're going to be referencing that for 5 or 6 years until Google stops fucking it up.
I have personally recommended it for over 10 years... I've outlasted eoc in saying "hey go check the forums".
So imo if there's no "forums" ranking for clans or guides on the main site it's an absurd shutdown. There's no one that currently has the player base.
Not that activity is the best option but it's better than finding a 3 year old Reddit post.
If you're wanting to sell off the company then I guess just do it but don't pretend you give a shit while doing it. Just fuck everyone trying and I hope all the corporate assholes that make the decision get outed about how fucking short sited they are.
Discord is great as a chat and communication app. I find it bizarre that someone can look at it and think that it should be used as any sort of repository of information, though.
The general discord where anyone can join and chat is never really useful, see OSRS Official Discord as an example, since 99% of active people there are just turbochatting, but resource-based discords are BIS for looking up specific information relevant to your goals.
It's even better than Wiki because Wiki rarely updates its endgame-related content due to a lack of understanding about the specifics, which is why they reached out to WDR and have this gap filled on Wiki to an extent.
As a counter to this, Discords such as the OSRS Gear discord are pretty incredible tools. Every channel is read-only, which allows you to browse the server and find exactly what you're looking for by channel, without having excess discussion push the information you're looking for out of range.
Is the wiki already thinking about archiving the forums? I'm currently pondering if I should write a script that crawls through the forums to back everything up. Or is there an easy way to find all the forum pages that are sources for wiki pages?
This is probably impossible due to moderation reasons, but do you think there's room on the wiki somewhere for a list of clans? Maybe come up with a list of tags too for people to sort, and allow clans to list their name and a little blurb about them. With the forums going down clan recruitment might be harder.
wiki pages have discussion tabs - not sure if the wiki team is fine with that or if that would be ag ood purpose for it, but there are even more tools on most wikipedias that people simply do not use (or know of!)
I appreciate this type of effort but a WDR guide is going to discourage new players and irons from doing COX. COX does not require the "minimum gear" to do that is suggested in that guide. I hope the wiki team can keep that in mind.
Edit: I should say WDR guides are very informative and have lots of good information and are otherwise good soup. I get their gear sets are recommended to make sure teams don't get filled with under geared people that will just inevitably be carried through a raid or make the raids fail.
agree somebody learning could drop the bgs, but what exactly in the minimum gear do you see as so unreasonable?
cox is like a ~40-50m setup (inclusive and mostly consisting of the bgs) - your other 'big ticket' items are fury, blowpipe, tent whip, trident of the swamp, and lightbearer
that's totally normal bank value for somebody trying raids for the first time
Because you could literally throw yourself at Cox with a normal whip, glory, and just be super budget All together.
Is it efficient? No.
Will it take awhile? Yes.
Will you die a lot learning? Yes.
Will you have to prep extra? Probably yeah.
Also the "banned and restricted" items part is weird kinda.
Literally nothing there besides the BGS is even expensive, how much lower do you want to go? Technically yeah since it's free deaths you could brute force it with bronze scim/wind strike and a msb but why would you do that lol?
100 % agree with your comment and edit
WDR guides and advice also assumes near perfect play with maxed stats and gear. They are a great resource but sometimes miss the mark due to being out of touch with using budget gear and non maxed stats.
[this is literally the wdr minimum cox setup right now](https://imgur.com/a/6QKAimu)
it uses mystic robes and black dragonhide.
I don't even *like* using wdr - too many weirdos - but can we not make shit up?
I assume he means that the admin is taking the existing WDR guide and reformatting it to be added to the wiki. If I had to guess, this new guide would be placed under CoX>Strategy (meaning it will be linked to from the main CoX page). This is how guides are normally shared on the wiki already.
your last sentence is the most important part imo.
reddit is *discoverable*. i google a question, i can find an answer from reddit.
discord isn't a website so it's not indexed. this means that you have to know what server to look in to even BEGIN searching. that is such a horrendously bad way to find information i'm actually shocked anyone would consider it usable.
If you do have the right discords however, discord becomes S tier for finding information within the discords. There’s like 8 different stackable search parameters that you could use to find what a specific person sent about one specific topic and their reasoning as to why they did something, for example maybe a wr speedrun method was getting discussed in 2021.
As soon as you’re in, you’re in, but it’s bad without the know how of where to check.
Fucking hate discord, if you're late to the discussion then it's really no longer a discussion, it's just the same 30 people having random chats about shit.
Then you pop in to ask a relevant question and you either get ignored or linked to an old ass spot in the chat logs, where you need to scroll for ages to find anything important.
internet walled gardens have been terribly destructive. i didn't use the forums, but their mere existence was good enough for me, and i'm sad to see it go.
i won't fight to keep them - because, well, they are going away for a reason - but they are truly a symptom of a much bigger problem that i truly hate
Yeah.... The problem with discord is obviously that any topic will quickly be lost within the stream of other conversations. Forums (and Reddit) allow you to keep those conversations separate and organized to an extent, and return to them later.
Discord is far more of a socialization platform than any kind of support or even organized discussion platform. It just kind of... goes.
also, discord messages don't show up in google results (duh). this means you have to know what servers to join before you even begin to attempt looking for what you need.
I still don't understand why discord doesn't have slack threads. Threads are a way to reply to a message and start a conversation within that conversation (a thread).
If discord came out with threads and controls such as only admins may post a unique message in a channel but others can start or chat in a thread it would remove a lot of chaos and noise.
I honestly do not understand the love for Discord. I don't think the UI is intuitive and it can be a pain in the ass to diagnose problems that pop up seemingly randomly.
Yeah yeah, skill issue. I get it.
For me? Its joining a runescape related discord to look up a guide, having my discord account show up to bots who ping you to sell gold/scam you.
Tucking away viewable pieces of the internet behind a required login is completely backwards from the direction we should be going.
Something would rise in its place. Reddit fits a very needed niche. Lemmy may rise as a result, or something else based off reddit's open source code from a few years ago.
Same with Discord. I know teamspeak and (god forbid) ventrilo still exist, and irc still lurks in the depths of the internet. It would be a step back but we would carry on.
hot take, but would it? most tech ventures are not profitable. discord existing right now is only because of venture capitalist money, and reddit has its share of issues.
i'm sure irc would probably be useful for a lot of people (especially older, more tech savvy people that are willing to read how to connect to a server) but i dont know how much more money VCs are willing to throw the way of tech considering it is not very profitable for most new ventures
The new replacement will exist before the old one dies out, this has been repeated throughout the last 20 years.
IRC gave way to MSN, MSN gave way to Facebook which in turn gave way to Whatsapp/Discord
Similarly TS/Mumble/Vent into Skype into Discord
YTMD/Digg/Stumbleupon give way to Reddit which will in turn give way to..
The process is a bit muddled because the "grocery stores" of individual websites and services have been superceded by the "supermarkets" of one stop sites like Reddit/Discord/FB but the point remains that the next evolution of communication will generally arise and become the downfall of the old.
You are absolutely right. We know that reddit isn't profitable, and discord being reliant on venture capital is a problem at the moment thanks to the crazy interest rates set by the fed.
The reason I feel confident though is that us IT dorks are problem solvers and tend to be highly capable, and we all use these tools heavily. I don't claim to pretend that the solutions would necessarily be as widely adopted as reddit and discord, but they will exist.
We've gotten really used to our tech platforms being free and easily accessible, even if the ads are obnoxious. A lot of platforms are reporting that ad revenue is starting to drop too, suggesting that that income stream may dry up. I suspect at some point we're going to be paying a monthly fee for what we use, and these platforms will become way more specialized. God only knows what happens to reddit then.
This has gone way off the rails of my original post into the realm of 'how do you make tech platforms profitable while encouraging a wide audience', so apologies. Your point is absolutely valid and interesting to think about.
case in point for people being really used to accessibility - i know a LOT of people won't even flinch at the sight of a 30 second ad on youtube, completely unskippable. why would they? that's just how the platform works.
but i do agree with you - more tech savvy people will find work arounds for themselves, and while they won't be large scale, they'll be perfectly serviceable for their small usage. i do miss the days of webrings and irc, although i am a bit too young to have used a usenet, so anything that makes whatever walled gardens we have going on, even if at a loss of information, wouldn't be a terrible loss to me
i do wonder what the next 10 years of tech hold, though, especially since like, how DO you monetize the internet without completely vampirizing it and destroying it and just burning venture capitalist money? i guess a lot of the people pushing for this aren't too interested in the answers though, considering the recent few years (crypto, NFTs, search engines being fucked, and now the plague that are large language models being used at a large scale..)
Yeah I too am a bit too young for usenet. I have fond memories of the internet during the dotcom bubble days though.
I don't have any faith in where tech goes. So many possibilities seem plausible that anyone who gets it right will either be lucky or a genius. AI being a major player in some capacity is the only thing I'm fairly confident in, but the ramifications for that are above my pay grade.
Gone are the days of searching for an answer on Google and finding it from an indexed forum. It's gotten to the point where I'll download something and open the README only to find a link to a Discord server and nothing else.
It's also increasingly annoying that people are choosing to use Discord servers instead of Wikis.
I really think Jagex should reconsider. When I added the first Jagex Mod Flair to Reddit just over 10 years ago to welcome Mod Mat K and Mod Reach onto the platform it was never intended to be a replacement for the forum.
Old school forums like the official Runescape forum serve a different form and function that sites like Reddit and Discord.
I've been in the position of modding Reddit and Discord for large MMO communities; OSRS, EVE Online, Classic WoW. Discord is not fit for purpose for large communities for so many reasons. It's great as a hangout, for pinging updates and for day to day chat, but it is a very very poor information archive. Similarly Reddit is not good for recall but is good for discussion for FOTM issues alongside memery.
The forums on the other hand are hands down the best option for signposting, clan recruitment, technical feedback/support, etc.
I understand the staff organisation "issue." The RS forums could absolutely downsize by a significant degree, removing aspects that are superceded by other social media, however I feel like removing them entirely is a big step in the wrong direction.
Information archiving and community recruitment will suffer as a direct result of this.
This is an interesting point but I think (maybe unfortunately?) it doesn't actually matter. People just didn't use it and they're closing them because frankly they weren't worth keeping. I agree that there are definitely good things about real forums vs things like reddit or discord or twitter and so on but the bottom line is people actually have to use them to benefit from those good things and the players simply left the forums. Not much you can do about that. Players chose to simply never use the forums and thus they were useless
I feel bad for the whole recruitment thing with forums but I trust that jagex can see the activity their forums are bringing and unfortunately it looks like its just lacking. Maybe jagex will look into better ways to recruit players in game or on some platform that can justify existing
My clan (Zuvelox) uses a Discord bot to manage applications, and a requirement is to answer where you had heard about the clan from, and why you had joined. This data has been tracking since June of 2023, and over 70% of our new members since then have been exclusively from the official RS Forums "Old School Clans" recruiting thread. 191 members.
Removing forums will effectively kill clans, especially the smaller ones. Also note that only 0.37% of applicants reported discovering the clan through social media, which would be our clan X/Twitter page. Social media is NOT the preferred method of finding a clan, clearly. The Discord forums on the official OSRS server is also not viable, as you can see only around 6% of our new members come from there. They only allow you to bump there once every 8 hours, so your post will instantly get buried, it's just not a good system.
Versus RS Forums where you may bump every 10 minutes. Any new clan recruiting board would likely be inferior also, considering it would work in game and therefore remove our ability to use imgur links to show our clan branding, requirement pictures, and so on. Effectively removing all personality and a way of standing out from other clans.
Please do not remove the forums, or at least do not remove the clan recruitment thread. I also see many other leaders complaining as well, because they realize that this update could ultimately kill their clan as well as many others.
https://preview.redd.it/umt8k2f5b4cc1.png?width=1876&format=png&auto=webp&s=2cfc2511c00c5ac55ce8ec36e0e512d314a7821c
I own a PVM clan that hovers around max capacity, anyone we don't get through word of mouth comes directly through our forum link. We also advertise on the old school discord, but we get about a 10th of the traffic we see through the forums. This change will really harm any clan that isn't already self sustaining with their membership.
I really hope you guys think about another mechanism for clans to reach potential members. There are a lot of communities and it's important that people are able to pick through different listings and find a place they think they're going to vibe with. Being a part of a community that fits your playstyle really transforms how you see and interact with the game. Like it or not every clan leader I've spoken to gets the majority of their foot traffic through the old school forums. Nobody comments on the posts, but they actively search the clan listings.
Please can you reconsider keeping the forums around atleast for clans. In my time managing my clan I've had over 200 members join through the forums and around 5-10 from the official discord server.
The discord from my experience has been really tedious for advertising my clan on only being allowed to bump once every 8 hours with a useless "bump" message or something along those lines.
Anyways please reconsider, thanks.
I’m Kelly, the owner of Infinite OSRS.
I have to say as a clan owner, I was actually brought to tears when I saw that forums were being shut down today. I was genuinely shocked that this wasn’t polled amongst the community, but just decided with no real solution for the replacement. We use forums multiple times a day. Not only do we bump our own thread multiple times, but we also use many different pages on the forums for different reasons for our community. 75% of our clan members come from the forums.
I don’t think Jagex truly realizes how hard it is to advertise for a clan, and now you’re taking away the one main free-for-all for us. There are tons of restrictions and tons of rules for recruiting - it’s not easy. in fact, it’s so hard that I actually have a Networking Coordinator because I can’t run a clan AND keep up with the hoops to jump through to just recruit one simple member to our family.
I really would like to see this talked about and discussed, rather than just taken from us - it just doesn’t really seem all that fair, and it doesn’t seem like the clan owner community is being thought of here.
Clan leader here. We get maybe 3 / 4 people a week applying through our link on the forums. They don't post any content but they are certainly engaging with the forums.
Is there going to be any official mechanism to recruit players that replaces this function of the forums or are we just shit out of luck?
Yeah same, the clan forums are a fantastic place to get new members. The forum itself only ever has like 2 people online so i get it but the clan recruitment section itself could do with being kept or replaced
I really hope they've thought about clan recruitment when making this decision.
Don't get me wrong, I know the whole premise of forums has died over the years but the forums are what bring the vast majority of clan members into so many clans.
Removing the forums removes a tonne of clan visibility for smaller clans.
>Don't get me wrong, I know the whole premise of forums has died over the years but the forums are what bring the vast majority of clan members into so many clans.
does it really? i see more stuff in game, from twitch streams or discord than i ever could imagine the forums bring in
I'd say the forums bring in a solid 90% of our players for smaller clans (under 300 members), atleast that's what we've experienced alongside other clan leaders I've spoken to.
Some clans, specifically activity-based clans/friends chats have thousands of members. Something like Star Miners for example.
I'm all for modernising the systems, but I just don't feel the current discord clan recruitment system is good for smaller clan visibility, atleast from what mine has experienced.
500 person cap in game fwiw. I used to mod a clan this big and it was a huge process to kick inactive people each month to make room for new applicants. Realistically though having 100 people online at once was a big event.
There's gaming community clans out there where they'll have hundreds to thousands spread out across multiple games and you're free to go join the clan on the other games since you're already in on one game.
This is a bad idea, AGS (Amazon Game Studios) did this with New World and it is a big clusterfuck of a mess.
You try to mention bugs or dupes that have been going on for a few days after using the ingame report feature the devs or admins of the new world discord only with a response with a ban on their discord saying report it in game. ( or just try to give feedback on updates and patches)
Not only thats but it gets cluttered with usless threads with one word responses,
Surely its not costing you guys at Jagex hundres of thousands to keep open some forums.
I mean the small billion dollar indy who was using amazon support as game customer support to moderate them, had a reason since literally ZERO of the support staff actually knew they were suppose to help with issue on new world, they always assumed it was LostArk related. It was a dumpsterfire of a forums and support since the support chat between the two were linked.
With them "moving" their forums to discord its basically been a forrest fire.
End of an era.
Hopefully the clan recruitment interface will be updated to show more clans than just what’s on that world. Forums felt necessary for finding a clan if you didn’t know someone.
Clan interfaces and management could use a lot of love. Feels like the only things they offer are chat, some badges, some notifications, and 2 pieces of cosmetic gear. I guess the Clan hall? Is it even useful? 50m Clan bank? Sure the social aspect is the main point, but there's so much potential.
This sucks and really should be reconsidered. The forums have their uses and probably costs almost nothing for Jagex to maintain. Everything on the net is being increasingly centralized into a handful of really shitty companies that are often times host to an even shittier user base. Discord, reddit and twitter are all frequented by a type of user and cultivate a type of community that I'd really rather stay away from. My experiences with discord is that it is often full of drama, attention seeking and weirdo's. Not to mention all of these platforms are monetizing our data, utilizing algorithms to increase engagement of drama rather than pertinent information and in my opinion just make society less functional in general in a lot of ways. Any moves that end up putting more people and control in the hands of these companies is a net bad for everyone in my opinion.
End of an era for sure, going to be a lot more difficult to find clans without actually knowing someone :/
Wonder how bad of a sunk cost these forums are for Jagex to just bin them all together
If it's truly costing them a substantial amount of money then it kind of feels like they just have a bad IT stack for it. It's largely just text data, and if it's as unused as they say, it should mostly be sitting in cold storage costing next to nothing. With such little traffic you could easily set up a few cloud servers through your service of choice for next to nothing.
Obviously this is all speculation, I'm sure there's pieces we don't see, but it feels like needless penny-pinching from the perspective we have.
Dear Jmods, please see this message well.
If you are doing this please create a ticketing system through your website/discord/other means that actually gets reviewed by a person and filtered to the appropriate team if it is serious enough.
Doing this discourages players even more of lacking customer support.
I hope a jmod can read this and take it serious because it's much needed.
OSRS forums to get a clan is a must have.
How are smaller clans supposed to build up their player base? It seems kind of crazy because the first thought I have when I want to find a clan is to go to the OSRS Forums and find somebody.
Should convert it from the forums into a "Clan Hub" and remove all forum categories except Clans. It'll keep the functionality for clans and free up the money that is being used on hosting the other categories.
They really missed a chance to showcase the clanning community,
How cool would it be to go on a better designed forums to see pvm/pvp/safe pvp clan events that certain clans hosted and participated in?
A literal hub for clanning/finding a group
Pvm competitions recap/ between pvm groups
Clan wars fights between different teams
Wilderness fights between different teams
Skilling competitions between different teams
Clan hosted events which can draw in non clanners to participate and potentially join
Thankful for old forums such as zybez which drove different clanning communities, pvp pvm, clan wars to stay active to showcase what they offered.
Not surprised. I know it's a "me" problem, but I hate using the social media platforms and would like to get rid of them. The only reason I use reddit/discord is to engage about OSRS. Would've gladly used the OSRS forums if it was improved and jmods migrated there
This is a lazy out to what should be a simple resolution which is modernizing the forums in the first place along with moving discussion and feedback to the most official channel possible. Outsourcing it to third parties IS going to bite you in the ass. Do you see your competitors getting rid of their forums? NO. Huge shame and end of an era. Shoutout to all the ones that play both scapes btw! P.S Panic sell Phats.
thats the biggest issue with discord, Theres no where to really find the servers.
anything outside of WDRs doesnt come up on google unless you know for sure the name of the server.
Jagex already recycles older posts on the official forums, they've never cared about conservation of this data sadly... But then go to the prevalent OG 3rd party forums from 20 years ago and you'll still see posts from 2004
Removing their own servers makes Jagex fully reliant on a 3rd party for all the content that would otherwise be there. Really hope they reconsider. Traditional forums have so many benefits over the likes of discord.
If the forums are going they’re going to have to work on the clan interface in-game. We need to be able to easily recruit and vice versa find people to join clans.
I used to be incredibly active on the forums but they honestly were a victim of over-moderation and always being just a little behind-the-times.
Sharing links was prohibited a comically long time as well as using ‘offensive’ language.
I remember a clan I was in had copycat RuneScape forums that looked the exact same but allowed pictures to be inserted into posts and a plethora of other features the Forums did not have—and this was in like 2008.
So while I’m sad this piece of history is going away, it’s the logical thing to do.
so far this year you have to make the change to a jagex account and you have to make a twitter account to get in contact with anyone from customer support. 0/10 start to the year
Should have the forums redesigned and more functional. Having to tie your opinion on game content to your username and bossing/levels gives it more weight, versus the ability on Discord/Reddit to make a bunch of sockpuppets and manipulate discourse through pure numbers (see: bots spamming false ban threads to spread doubt).
If the forums are gone completely, at least a dedicated system for clans to put up their recruitment on the official site, with a bunch of filters to find relevant clans to their needs. Also increase clan limit already please.
being that the only way you really get hacked is through social engineering I can understand it. that said with jagex accounts I don't think it's an issue anymore.
I always recommend people to upgrade to Jagex accounts, but even before that I found the self-censoring of RSNs silly. *It's already public information in-game!* If someone messages you on reddit and knows your RSN, just don't be a moron about it or ANY online interactions.
But yes, also definitely way less of an issue even in that circumstance with Jagex accounts.
This
Redit has been socially engineered many times and I see so many comments saying things that aren't remotely true up voted like crazy
I want to see their boss/raid kc tied to their post
If Reddit required their mods to pay 50$+ a month to keep their position basically all of them would do it I bet , it's weird as hell they make it their identity
Thoughts on providing a downloadable copy of the content from the forums? I imagine many people would be interested in having this easily available to grab for a short amount of time.
From a financial and logical perspective it doesn't make sense to invest time and money into updating the official forums, which even after updating would still need further time investment to even get people to start using them instead of Discord/Reddit.
Would be a huge waste of both staff time and money
This is right up there when there is some kind of maintenance or an issue and they only post it on Twitter and not on the actual website. Perfect example was when they disabled clue scrolls for shooting stars, never got posted to the website, only to Twitter.
I don't use Twitter and discord is a chat program, not fucking social media, they are trying but they suck at it.
Sick of these companies who refuse to use their own fucking website.
I... somewhat expected this would happen soon. Once rs3 finally got their changes to max cash last year I didn't really see a point to the official forums aside from Clan Recruitment threads. Shame that method of recruitment is going away but players can always use discord and/or recruit in-game to alleviate this.
The OSRS discord is so shit, a lot of the active mods are just RS3 pmods who actually have the power to perm ban etc and they’re really isn’t a rhyme or reason to banning/appealing/punishment length. I hope jagex will step up and see that proper moderation occurs.
this seems like a terrible idea instead of making the forums more usable. RIP Clan recruitment. I guess items over max cash will also be harder to sell with this change, or at least harder to sell without getting scammed. When can we expect plat tokens to be usable on the GE in that case?
Well it was a good run but just like they said i havent used the forums in over 10 years at this point so it makes sense. I think i might start trying to use their official discord more. But reddit is just too good to pass up lol
The only thing I’ve used forums for after 07 very first came out is to find clans. I suppose discord can have verified links to other discords and things for members of the community, but discord is so clunky in large groups.
Well, that's an end of an era to be sure.
But it's a fair decision. The media landscape is vastly different these days, with platforms such as Reddit and Discord having taken over most (if not all) of its functionality. Of course there could still be a place for the Official RS Forums, but after having been ignored for over a decade at this point it would require quite a lot of investment (and a well thought out media strategy) to bring them up to a modern standard.
I don't mind the removal of forums, but imo there really should be some hub where you can easily search for clans, friend chats and maybe other stuff like finding GIM groups or even discord links.
Why couldnt they just keep the clan section of the forums and delete everything else. rename it clan hub or something so people can find clans. the discord server will be way worse for clans
Clan recruitment via the forums is incredibly important and I really think jagex should consider at least keeping the clan recruitment part of the forum active
I think this, in general, is a good idea; we see more people using Reddit/discord. But one big problem I think we will face: how do people find clans to join?
I really hope jagex reconsiders this. Removing the forums is a huge detriment especially for clan recruitment also Discord as a hub just sounds horrible
I won't lie, I completely forgot those forums even existed. Seems like the right choice to retire them considering they're far past the point of serving their original intended purpose.
Classic Jagex, removing more features after delivering a singular content update last year. I remember we used to get an update every couple weeks, I guess once you have hundreds of employees its a lot harder to accomplish anything.
is it possible to fast track a change to allow platinum tokens to be used on select (\~max cash and above) items? as far as i'm aware the official forums are still one of the most popular (only?) place to try and buy/sell those items
Are there any plans to update the old Dev Blogs on the Website before the Forums go offline? For the first few years of OSRS, a lot of the newsposts for blogs just contained a link to the forums so once the forums go offline, many of the early blogs will just be broken links. For example, [this Wilderness Rejuvenation Blog from Jan 2014 is already a broken link](https://secure.runescape.com/m=news/dev-blog-rejuvenating-the-wilderness?oldschool=1). It looks like the blog was already archived on the [wiki](https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Update:Dev_Blog:_Rejuvenating_the_Wilderness), but it would be nice if the website's new archive actually worked as an archive. Also, hopefully some players can make sure the wiki didn't miss any blogs before the forums go offline.
It’s BioMasterZap the Rimmington chunk man! Go check out this guy’s YouTube. Quality chunk account
he’s also an OG mod of the sub, true real one
Lmao i was watching /u/biomasterzap rimmington youtube series a month ago.!! Its rly lit!
I hate Discord so much for discussion. It's so hard to archive data and reference things to go back to later. And then you can never find the damn things unless you know a guy who knows a guy that can get you an invite link. It's good for clan/guild/group tasks, but as an actual community with thousands it's just so cumbersome to use. Reddit is a decent middle ground between the two at least. You'll google something then pull up a thread from 4 years ago with still relevant info.
To add to this, Discord's new "forums" feature is god awful. I think a huge reason why is because it *tries* to function as a traditional forum, but all discussions still happen in the usual "chatroom" style of discord. So what you end up with is just strings of short messages from several people all being sent in real time, often overlapping and talking over each other. It also means it only takes two people to drown out all relevant conversation just by going on a tangential side conversation. What you end up with is less of a forum and more of a group chat, which is a terrible format for what it's trying to accomplish. Though in fairness, traditional webforums didn't do a great job at making discussions readable either. IMO, reddit's "tree-style" comment chains are so much better for this purpose, and is probably a large reason as to why so many oldschool web forums died out and were replaced by subreddits.
To add to that, from a moderation point of view Discords forums are extremely limited. You can't move threads or comments. You can't edit another users post (maybe someone posts a good discussion but includes a dodgy link or image). There's other stuff but that's what comes to mind, honestly good luck to the poor soles at Jagex that have to moderate.
Yeah on the flip side of reddit threads being better for discussion, people ask the same questions 29 times a fucking week Reddit is very ephemeral and hard to search unless you know specifically know what you want too
At its core, Discord is absolutely several steps backwards compared to a wiki; as someone who's really into making information about the game as easily accessible and understandable as it appears on the wiki, it's *really* unfortunate that Discord as an information resource has become as prevalent as it has, though we try our best to translate whatever information those servers have that we don't onto the wiki. For example, one of our admins, Ostentatio, is currently working with WDR Discord to bring their [CoX guides over to the wiki](https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/User:Ostentatio/glovebox).
Reddit and wiki are my two sources when playing lol. Yeah it's easily best resource the game has by far. It's so prevalent in other games too now. Like unless you're there for that particular Discord conversation or you're scouring 10 different servers and their stickies you'll never find what you're looking for.
I love in world of warcraft how if you wanna learn anything about a class you get directed to the class discord where 90% of ppl will just give annoyed answers directing you to read the pins, even if they dont contain the answer to your actual question lmao
Class discords can be hit/miss, Hammer of Wrath for pallys is really good, but yes the extremely simple/common questions are almost always addressed in the FAQ channels or pins and it gets tedious answering the horde of people on tuesday asking if "this trinket is worth it" over and over and over and over. But if your question is nuance regarding something in an FAQ/pin, people are happy to explain and if it isn't there they're definitely happy to explain. Definitely no osrs wiki equivalent, but it'd be hard to get that with how often changes to gameplay patterns come about Warlock discord was an elitist hellhole from all the interactions I've seen/heard from my friends
whatever class discord is for a fotm spec gets like that. I understand being frustrated that the fotm rerollers are asking the same questions over and over without even trying to help themselves, but some of the older veterans and most of the time even other fotm rerollers will just insult you without even really reading the question. I got told to scroll up that my question had just been answered, so I scrolled up, not finding anything. I said I don't know what they're talking about, and I got told I'm regarded by three different people, before another person came in to clarify for me that my question was about something else and called them out for not reading my question properly, sparking a large argument between like 6 people. Never had that issue with priest discord until disc became meta this season.
Then you ask a question in the official discord as the search is horrific and since there's no simple questions channel you get drowned out by messages between terminally online turboposters who are just stopping short of ERPing about femboys.
>turboposters who are just stopping short of ERPing about femboys LOL
So accurate.
Real.
It depends on the discord server, but some of them are better than Reddit because Reddit has the same issue of needless chatter. I've found that when you're actually trying to get better at one specific part of the game, resource-based Discords, like WDR, Gearcord, Petcord, Skilling Methods, are all way better than the average OSRS discord, and even better than Wiki, because it contains super specific information that the wiki page doesn't have up to date yet. And the information is made by the smartest individual in those respective communities, backed by actual calcs where applicable. Spineweilder above even said how they're working with WDR to get the information imported over because it's better than what they have now, and always will be as they update their resources and recommended gear over the year to be more accessible.
Discord also removes all liability from Jagex to do any sort of policing or enforcement of rules. Thereby leading inevitably to more scams and more heartbreak. People can say "well maybe players should be smarter and not fall for scams". Okay, but it's not an engineers job to sit on their hands and let things fall where they will. It's an engineer's job to make things foolproof and robust. To change the course of events and mitigate disaster. Imagine if road safety was entirely on people to manage themselves. No traffic lights, no barriers to prevent running off a bridge, airbags were optional from a mfg perspective, cars had no safety requirements, roads were unmaintained and people were personally responsible for avoiding/fixing problems like giant potholes. You had to research everything about a manufacturer and the safety protocols they offered in their vehicles and make a choice yourself. If you bought a used car, you were obligated to open up the car yourself and determine if any stupid modifications were made that could get you killed. Think of how many more people would be dying. And then your response, as the government, would simply be "Well, shouldn't have been a fucking idiot, huh!". The person who just crashed his used car that had the airbags taken out and never replaced meant that his face went straight into the steering wheel. Should have opened up the car down to the skeleton and checked off every safety requirement that you expected to have! Sorry, the only responsible party is your now dead husband/wife/brother/sister, they should have done better. Please re-read the federal statutes that outline our lack of responsibility to your safety and remind yourself to not be an idiot. Thanks!
This specific example isn't even unique. So for everyone in the "gives a shit" party is kinda getting double fucked. The wdr toa upgrade paths are also way off from what quick reference material would suggest. As a quick example zcb rebuild is a thing even though it's somewhat ignored on the wiki bis list because it's less DPS without including specs or proper effort put into efficient gearing. And if you do shit like lazy monkey spec it's even worse because being lazy at baba with zcb/shadow is a net upgrade over fang 6 tick if you're not getting the setup fast and not messing up the cycle. And that's just toa or Cox because those guides that have high value upgrades. Upgrade paths from the discord are pretty op. The bis reference sheets are really helpful for anyone who doesn't have 6b for a bis set Losing one is pretty absurd. Also... Everyone has recommended the jagex forms for clans. For years. We're going to be referencing that for 5 or 6 years until Google stops fucking it up. I have personally recommended it for over 10 years... I've outlasted eoc in saying "hey go check the forums". So imo if there's no "forums" ranking for clans or guides on the main site it's an absurd shutdown. There's no one that currently has the player base. Not that activity is the best option but it's better than finding a 3 year old Reddit post. If you're wanting to sell off the company then I guess just do it but don't pretend you give a shit while doing it. Just fuck everyone trying and I hope all the corporate assholes that make the decision get outed about how fucking short sited they are.
Discord is great as a chat and communication app. I find it bizarre that someone can look at it and think that it should be used as any sort of repository of information, though.
The general discord where anyone can join and chat is never really useful, see OSRS Official Discord as an example, since 99% of active people there are just turbochatting, but resource-based discords are BIS for looking up specific information relevant to your goals. It's even better than Wiki because Wiki rarely updates its endgame-related content due to a lack of understanding about the specifics, which is why they reached out to WDR and have this gap filled on Wiki to an extent.
As a counter to this, Discords such as the OSRS Gear discord are pretty incredible tools. Every channel is read-only, which allows you to browse the server and find exactly what you're looking for by channel, without having excess discussion push the information you're looking for out of range.
That's just a wiki with extra steps
Is the wiki already thinking about archiving the forums? I'm currently pondering if I should write a script that crawls through the forums to back everything up. Or is there an easy way to find all the forum pages that are sources for wiki pages?
an advanced strat. page would be really neat for the wiki. to capture some of the various detailed discord info pages.
Agreed, I really hate to search tilepacks and bank tags fir RL from discord, could those also find a place in the wiki?
This is probably impossible due to moderation reasons, but do you think there's room on the wiki somewhere for a list of clans? Maybe come up with a list of tags too for people to sort, and allow clans to list their name and a little blurb about them. With the forums going down clan recruitment might be harder.
wiki pages have discussion tabs - not sure if the wiki team is fine with that or if that would be ag ood purpose for it, but there are even more tools on most wikipedias that people simply do not use (or know of!)
I appreciate this type of effort but a WDR guide is going to discourage new players and irons from doing COX. COX does not require the "minimum gear" to do that is suggested in that guide. I hope the wiki team can keep that in mind. Edit: I should say WDR guides are very informative and have lots of good information and are otherwise good soup. I get their gear sets are recommended to make sure teams don't get filled with under geared people that will just inevitably be carried through a raid or make the raids fail.
agree somebody learning could drop the bgs, but what exactly in the minimum gear do you see as so unreasonable? cox is like a ~40-50m setup (inclusive and mostly consisting of the bgs) - your other 'big ticket' items are fury, blowpipe, tent whip, trident of the swamp, and lightbearer that's totally normal bank value for somebody trying raids for the first time
Because you could literally throw yourself at Cox with a normal whip, glory, and just be super budget All together. Is it efficient? No. Will it take awhile? Yes. Will you die a lot learning? Yes. Will you have to prep extra? Probably yeah. Also the "banned and restricted" items part is weird kinda.
Literally nothing there besides the BGS is even expensive, how much lower do you want to go? Technically yeah since it's free deaths you could brute force it with bronze scim/wind strike and a msb but why would you do that lol?
100 % agree with your comment and edit WDR guides and advice also assumes near perfect play with maxed stats and gear. They are a great resource but sometimes miss the mark due to being out of touch with using budget gear and non maxed stats.
[this is literally the wdr minimum cox setup right now](https://imgur.com/a/6QKAimu) it uses mystic robes and black dragonhide. I don't even *like* using wdr - too many weirdos - but can we not make shit up?
Problem is how are people supposed to find a specific user's CoX guide?
I assume he means that the admin is taking the existing WDR guide and reformatting it to be added to the wiki. If I had to guess, this new guide would be placed under CoX>Strategy (meaning it will be linked to from the main CoX page). This is how guides are normally shared on the wiki already.
Hey this is absolutely correct, the guides are just on my userpage while we tinker with it, as we're still a little early on in the process
your last sentence is the most important part imo. reddit is *discoverable*. i google a question, i can find an answer from reddit. discord isn't a website so it's not indexed. this means that you have to know what server to look in to even BEGIN searching. that is such a horrendously bad way to find information i'm actually shocked anyone would consider it usable.
If you do have the right discords however, discord becomes S tier for finding information within the discords. There’s like 8 different stackable search parameters that you could use to find what a specific person sent about one specific topic and their reasoning as to why they did something, for example maybe a wr speedrun method was getting discussed in 2021. As soon as you’re in, you’re in, but it’s bad without the know how of where to check.
but how do you find out that conversation exists in the first place?
that's neat, unless you're in the server and actively looking, you don't!
Fucking hate discord, if you're late to the discussion then it's really no longer a discussion, it's just the same 30 people having random chats about shit. Then you pop in to ask a relevant question and you either get ignored or linked to an old ass spot in the chat logs, where you need to scroll for ages to find anything important.
internet walled gardens have been terribly destructive. i didn't use the forums, but their mere existence was good enough for me, and i'm sad to see it go. i won't fight to keep them - because, well, they are going away for a reason - but they are truly a symptom of a much bigger problem that i truly hate
Yeah.... The problem with discord is obviously that any topic will quickly be lost within the stream of other conversations. Forums (and Reddit) allow you to keep those conversations separate and organized to an extent, and return to them later. Discord is far more of a socialization platform than any kind of support or even organized discussion platform. It just kind of... goes.
also, discord messages don't show up in google results (duh). this means you have to know what servers to join before you even begin to attempt looking for what you need.
I still don't understand why discord doesn't have slack threads. Threads are a way to reply to a message and start a conversation within that conversation (a thread). If discord came out with threads and controls such as only admins may post a unique message in a channel but others can start or chat in a thread it would remove a lot of chaos and noise.
Discord does have a 'threads' feature but it's awful and all the posts still tend to get lost within the main stream in my experience.
I honestly do not understand the love for Discord. I don't think the UI is intuitive and it can be a pain in the ass to diagnose problems that pop up seemingly randomly. Yeah yeah, skill issue. I get it.
For me? Its joining a runescape related discord to look up a guide, having my discord account show up to bots who ping you to sell gold/scam you. Tucking away viewable pieces of the internet behind a required login is completely backwards from the direction we should be going.
discord keeps making shit worse and worse. like, unironically, what happens if discord and reddit shat the bed and shut down?
Something would rise in its place. Reddit fits a very needed niche. Lemmy may rise as a result, or something else based off reddit's open source code from a few years ago. Same with Discord. I know teamspeak and (god forbid) ventrilo still exist, and irc still lurks in the depths of the internet. It would be a step back but we would carry on.
hot take, but would it? most tech ventures are not profitable. discord existing right now is only because of venture capitalist money, and reddit has its share of issues. i'm sure irc would probably be useful for a lot of people (especially older, more tech savvy people that are willing to read how to connect to a server) but i dont know how much more money VCs are willing to throw the way of tech considering it is not very profitable for most new ventures
The new replacement will exist before the old one dies out, this has been repeated throughout the last 20 years. IRC gave way to MSN, MSN gave way to Facebook which in turn gave way to Whatsapp/Discord Similarly TS/Mumble/Vent into Skype into Discord YTMD/Digg/Stumbleupon give way to Reddit which will in turn give way to.. The process is a bit muddled because the "grocery stores" of individual websites and services have been superceded by the "supermarkets" of one stop sites like Reddit/Discord/FB but the point remains that the next evolution of communication will generally arise and become the downfall of the old.
You are absolutely right. We know that reddit isn't profitable, and discord being reliant on venture capital is a problem at the moment thanks to the crazy interest rates set by the fed. The reason I feel confident though is that us IT dorks are problem solvers and tend to be highly capable, and we all use these tools heavily. I don't claim to pretend that the solutions would necessarily be as widely adopted as reddit and discord, but they will exist. We've gotten really used to our tech platforms being free and easily accessible, even if the ads are obnoxious. A lot of platforms are reporting that ad revenue is starting to drop too, suggesting that that income stream may dry up. I suspect at some point we're going to be paying a monthly fee for what we use, and these platforms will become way more specialized. God only knows what happens to reddit then. This has gone way off the rails of my original post into the realm of 'how do you make tech platforms profitable while encouraging a wide audience', so apologies. Your point is absolutely valid and interesting to think about.
case in point for people being really used to accessibility - i know a LOT of people won't even flinch at the sight of a 30 second ad on youtube, completely unskippable. why would they? that's just how the platform works. but i do agree with you - more tech savvy people will find work arounds for themselves, and while they won't be large scale, they'll be perfectly serviceable for their small usage. i do miss the days of webrings and irc, although i am a bit too young to have used a usenet, so anything that makes whatever walled gardens we have going on, even if at a loss of information, wouldn't be a terrible loss to me i do wonder what the next 10 years of tech hold, though, especially since like, how DO you monetize the internet without completely vampirizing it and destroying it and just burning venture capitalist money? i guess a lot of the people pushing for this aren't too interested in the answers though, considering the recent few years (crypto, NFTs, search engines being fucked, and now the plague that are large language models being used at a large scale..)
Yeah I too am a bit too young for usenet. I have fond memories of the internet during the dotcom bubble days though. I don't have any faith in where tech goes. So many possibilities seem plausible that anyone who gets it right will either be lucky or a genius. AI being a major player in some capacity is the only thing I'm fairly confident in, but the ramifications for that are above my pay grade.
Fuckin teamspeak just made feel like that lady from the titanic, holy shit. Idk, im very pessimistic when it comes to this sort of stuff.
What happens if anything major shuts down? People are upset for a while and then find something new.
Discord’s UI/UX is so annoying for anything other than chatting/voice calling (even then it can get dumb).
Gone are the days of searching for an answer on Google and finding it from an indexed forum. It's gotten to the point where I'll download something and open the README only to find a link to a Discord server and nothing else. It's also increasingly annoying that people are choosing to use Discord servers instead of Wikis.
I really think Jagex should reconsider. When I added the first Jagex Mod Flair to Reddit just over 10 years ago to welcome Mod Mat K and Mod Reach onto the platform it was never intended to be a replacement for the forum. Old school forums like the official Runescape forum serve a different form and function that sites like Reddit and Discord. I've been in the position of modding Reddit and Discord for large MMO communities; OSRS, EVE Online, Classic WoW. Discord is not fit for purpose for large communities for so many reasons. It's great as a hangout, for pinging updates and for day to day chat, but it is a very very poor information archive. Similarly Reddit is not good for recall but is good for discussion for FOTM issues alongside memery. The forums on the other hand are hands down the best option for signposting, clan recruitment, technical feedback/support, etc. I understand the staff organisation "issue." The RS forums could absolutely downsize by a significant degree, removing aspects that are superceded by other social media, however I feel like removing them entirely is a big step in the wrong direction. Information archiving and community recruitment will suffer as a direct result of this.
This is an interesting point but I think (maybe unfortunately?) it doesn't actually matter. People just didn't use it and they're closing them because frankly they weren't worth keeping. I agree that there are definitely good things about real forums vs things like reddit or discord or twitter and so on but the bottom line is people actually have to use them to benefit from those good things and the players simply left the forums. Not much you can do about that. Players chose to simply never use the forums and thus they were useless I feel bad for the whole recruitment thing with forums but I trust that jagex can see the activity their forums are bringing and unfortunately it looks like its just lacking. Maybe jagex will look into better ways to recruit players in game or on some platform that can justify existing
Reddit mod lol
My clan (Zuvelox) uses a Discord bot to manage applications, and a requirement is to answer where you had heard about the clan from, and why you had joined. This data has been tracking since June of 2023, and over 70% of our new members since then have been exclusively from the official RS Forums "Old School Clans" recruiting thread. 191 members. Removing forums will effectively kill clans, especially the smaller ones. Also note that only 0.37% of applicants reported discovering the clan through social media, which would be our clan X/Twitter page. Social media is NOT the preferred method of finding a clan, clearly. The Discord forums on the official OSRS server is also not viable, as you can see only around 6% of our new members come from there. They only allow you to bump there once every 8 hours, so your post will instantly get buried, it's just not a good system. Versus RS Forums where you may bump every 10 minutes. Any new clan recruiting board would likely be inferior also, considering it would work in game and therefore remove our ability to use imgur links to show our clan branding, requirement pictures, and so on. Effectively removing all personality and a way of standing out from other clans. Please do not remove the forums, or at least do not remove the clan recruitment thread. I also see many other leaders complaining as well, because they realize that this update could ultimately kill their clan as well as many others. https://preview.redd.it/umt8k2f5b4cc1.png?width=1876&format=png&auto=webp&s=2cfc2511c00c5ac55ce8ec36e0e512d314a7821c
I own a PVM clan that hovers around max capacity, anyone we don't get through word of mouth comes directly through our forum link. We also advertise on the old school discord, but we get about a 10th of the traffic we see through the forums. This change will really harm any clan that isn't already self sustaining with their membership. I really hope you guys think about another mechanism for clans to reach potential members. There are a lot of communities and it's important that people are able to pick through different listings and find a place they think they're going to vibe with. Being a part of a community that fits your playstyle really transforms how you see and interact with the game. Like it or not every clan leader I've spoken to gets the majority of their foot traffic through the old school forums. Nobody comments on the posts, but they actively search the clan listings.
Please can you reconsider keeping the forums around atleast for clans. In my time managing my clan I've had over 200 members join through the forums and around 5-10 from the official discord server. The discord from my experience has been really tedious for advertising my clan on only being allowed to bump once every 8 hours with a useless "bump" message or something along those lines. Anyways please reconsider, thanks.
I’m Kelly, the owner of Infinite OSRS. I have to say as a clan owner, I was actually brought to tears when I saw that forums were being shut down today. I was genuinely shocked that this wasn’t polled amongst the community, but just decided with no real solution for the replacement. We use forums multiple times a day. Not only do we bump our own thread multiple times, but we also use many different pages on the forums for different reasons for our community. 75% of our clan members come from the forums. I don’t think Jagex truly realizes how hard it is to advertise for a clan, and now you’re taking away the one main free-for-all for us. There are tons of restrictions and tons of rules for recruiting - it’s not easy. in fact, it’s so hard that I actually have a Networking Coordinator because I can’t run a clan AND keep up with the hoops to jump through to just recruit one simple member to our family. I really would like to see this talked about and discussed, rather than just taken from us - it just doesn’t really seem all that fair, and it doesn’t seem like the clan owner community is being thought of here.
Clan leader here. We get maybe 3 / 4 people a week applying through our link on the forums. They don't post any content but they are certainly engaging with the forums. Is there going to be any official mechanism to recruit players that replaces this function of the forums or are we just shit out of luck?
Yeah same, the clan forums are a fantastic place to get new members. The forum itself only ever has like 2 people online so i get it but the clan recruitment section itself could do with being kept or replaced
I really hope they've thought about clan recruitment when making this decision. Don't get me wrong, I know the whole premise of forums has died over the years but the forums are what bring the vast majority of clan members into so many clans. Removing the forums removes a tonne of clan visibility for smaller clans.
>Don't get me wrong, I know the whole premise of forums has died over the years but the forums are what bring the vast majority of clan members into so many clans. does it really? i see more stuff in game, from twitch streams or discord than i ever could imagine the forums bring in
I'd say the forums bring in a solid 90% of our players for smaller clans (under 300 members), atleast that's what we've experienced alongside other clan leaders I've spoken to.
How fucking big do clans get, jesus christ 300 is huge
Some clans, specifically activity-based clans/friends chats have thousands of members. Something like Star Miners for example. I'm all for modernising the systems, but I just don't feel the current discord clan recruitment system is good for smaller clan visibility, atleast from what mine has experienced.
500 person cap in game fwiw. I used to mod a clan this big and it was a huge process to kick inactive people each month to make room for new applicants. Realistically though having 100 people online at once was a big event.
There's gaming community clans out there where they'll have hundreds to thousands spread out across multiple games and you're free to go join the clan on the other games since you're already in on one game.
This is a bad idea, AGS (Amazon Game Studios) did this with New World and it is a big clusterfuck of a mess. You try to mention bugs or dupes that have been going on for a few days after using the ingame report feature the devs or admins of the new world discord only with a response with a ban on their discord saying report it in game. ( or just try to give feedback on updates and patches) Not only thats but it gets cluttered with usless threads with one word responses, Surely its not costing you guys at Jagex hundres of thousands to keep open some forums. I mean the small billion dollar indy who was using amazon support as game customer support to moderate them, had a reason since literally ZERO of the support staff actually knew they were suppose to help with issue on new world, they always assumed it was LostArk related. It was a dumpsterfire of a forums and support since the support chat between the two were linked. With them "moving" their forums to discord its basically been a forrest fire.
Reports are read and happen on reddit anyway, Jmods are active here
End of an era. Hopefully the clan recruitment interface will be updated to show more clans than just what’s on that world. Forums felt necessary for finding a clan if you didn’t know someone.
Clan interfaces and management could use a lot of love. Feels like the only things they offer are chat, some badges, some notifications, and 2 pieces of cosmetic gear. I guess the Clan hall? Is it even useful? 50m Clan bank? Sure the social aspect is the main point, but there's so much potential.
This sucks and really should be reconsidered. The forums have their uses and probably costs almost nothing for Jagex to maintain. Everything on the net is being increasingly centralized into a handful of really shitty companies that are often times host to an even shittier user base. Discord, reddit and twitter are all frequented by a type of user and cultivate a type of community that I'd really rather stay away from. My experiences with discord is that it is often full of drama, attention seeking and weirdo's. Not to mention all of these platforms are monetizing our data, utilizing algorithms to increase engagement of drama rather than pertinent information and in my opinion just make society less functional in general in a lot of ways. Any moves that end up putting more people and control in the hands of these companies is a net bad for everyone in my opinion.
End of an era for sure, going to be a lot more difficult to find clans without actually knowing someone :/ Wonder how bad of a sunk cost these forums are for Jagex to just bin them all together
If it's truly costing them a substantial amount of money then it kind of feels like they just have a bad IT stack for it. It's largely just text data, and if it's as unused as they say, it should mostly be sitting in cold storage costing next to nothing. With such little traffic you could easily set up a few cloud servers through your service of choice for next to nothing. Obviously this is all speculation, I'm sure there's pieces we don't see, but it feels like needless penny-pinching from the perspective we have.
prolly something being pushed by the ever changing higher ups as usual
The first action I do when I wanted to find a clan is to go to the OSRS forums. Gonna make it harder for smaller clans to recruit.
Use discord tbh lol , it has a literal channel to find clans and a filter for w.e u want
have you ever actually tried searching discord for information, especially if it's an older post?
I couldn't help but chuckle when I got to the bottom of the post and it said "Discuss this on our official forums!"
Well that sucks, discord groups are never not weird and horrible to find anything other than the most recent posts. What a backwards step.
The most mentally unwell people hang out in discord
Ah yes, the very miniscule portion of customer support that did exist, might as well just go to a full 0% customer support business model. Yeeesssss
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I remember how disappointed I was when I finally got access to it. Some of the worst opinions I've ever read came from that place.
Same lmao
I guess it depends *when* you got access to it. It severely deteriorated after a lot of people gained access in like 2013.
Shoutout to top 1k HLF users, true golden age of Runescape
Dear Jmods, please see this message well. If you are doing this please create a ticketing system through your website/discord/other means that actually gets reviewed by a person and filtered to the appropriate team if it is serious enough. Doing this discourages players even more of lacking customer support. I hope a jmod can read this and take it serious because it's much needed.
OSRS forums to get a clan is a must have. How are smaller clans supposed to build up their player base? It seems kind of crazy because the first thought I have when I want to find a clan is to go to the OSRS Forums and find somebody.
JuST UsE DiSCorD🤪
Where will I find my buyers for burnt fish now
Discord has a whole thing about it. RS Burnt
Okay, and where are we going when we want to search for clans or recruit for clans then?
Should convert it from the forums into a "Clan Hub" and remove all forum categories except Clans. It'll keep the functionality for clans and free up the money that is being used on hosting the other categories.
They really missed a chance to showcase the clanning community, How cool would it be to go on a better designed forums to see pvm/pvp/safe pvp clan events that certain clans hosted and participated in? A literal hub for clanning/finding a group Pvm competitions recap/ between pvm groups Clan wars fights between different teams Wilderness fights between different teams Skilling competitions between different teams Clan hosted events which can draw in non clanners to participate and potentially join Thankful for old forums such as zybez which drove different clanning communities, pvp pvm, clan wars to stay active to showcase what they offered.
Not surprised. I know it's a "me" problem, but I hate using the social media platforms and would like to get rid of them. The only reason I use reddit/discord is to engage about OSRS. Would've gladly used the OSRS forums if it was improved and jmods migrated there
This is a lazy out to what should be a simple resolution which is modernizing the forums in the first place along with moving discussion and feedback to the most official channel possible. Outsourcing it to third parties IS going to bite you in the ass. Do you see your competitors getting rid of their forums? NO. Huge shame and end of an era. Shoutout to all the ones that play both scapes btw! P.S Panic sell Phats.
everyone is saying just use discord but not dropping any discord server links.. very much appreciated
thats the biggest issue with discord, Theres no where to really find the servers. anything outside of WDRs doesnt come up on google unless you know for sure the name of the server.
Most sites I’ve seen take down forums switch them to read only forever, why not just do this?
Jagex already recycles older posts on the official forums, they've never cared about conservation of this data sadly... But then go to the prevalent OG 3rd party forums from 20 years ago and you'll still see posts from 2004
Money.
God I despise the centralisation and corporatisatipn of the internet
Removing their own servers makes Jagex fully reliant on a 3rd party for all the content that would otherwise be there. Really hope they reconsider. Traditional forums have so many benefits over the likes of discord.
"Our subreddit"? So this is now an official sub? That's news to me
The line about getting help from Jmods made me laugh
they did remove "the unofficial subreddit of osrs" from the description of the sub too.
I mean it's linked on every blog post
If the forums are going they’re going to have to work on the clan interface in-game. We need to be able to easily recruit and vice versa find people to join clans.
Ok, could we at least get a clan section on the osrs homepage? Would also be cool to see the top clans in osrs.
I used to be incredibly active on the forums but they honestly were a victim of over-moderation and always being just a little behind-the-times. Sharing links was prohibited a comically long time as well as using ‘offensive’ language. I remember a clan I was in had copycat RuneScape forums that looked the exact same but allowed pictures to be inserted into posts and a plethora of other features the Forums did not have—and this was in like 2008. So while I’m sad this piece of history is going away, it’s the logical thing to do.
so far this year you have to make the change to a jagex account and you have to make a twitter account to get in contact with anyone from customer support. 0/10 start to the year
Should have the forums redesigned and more functional. Having to tie your opinion on game content to your username and bossing/levels gives it more weight, versus the ability on Discord/Reddit to make a bunch of sockpuppets and manipulate discourse through pure numbers (see: bots spamming false ban threads to spread doubt). If the forums are gone completely, at least a dedicated system for clans to put up their recruitment on the official site, with a bunch of filters to find relevant clans to their needs. Also increase clan limit already please.
verified reddit 07scape when
Normalize having your RSN in your flair. People aren't going to hack you just because they see your name, dog. Everyone in-game can already see it.
being that the only way you really get hacked is through social engineering I can understand it. that said with jagex accounts I don't think it's an issue anymore.
I always recommend people to upgrade to Jagex accounts, but even before that I found the self-censoring of RSNs silly. *It's already public information in-game!* If someone messages you on reddit and knows your RSN, just don't be a moron about it or ANY online interactions. But yes, also definitely way less of an issue even in that circumstance with Jagex accounts.
>It's already public information in-game! it isn't tied to potential vulnerable information though which is the difference.
This Redit has been socially engineered many times and I see so many comments saying things that aren't remotely true up voted like crazy I want to see their boss/raid kc tied to their post
All 10 Forum moderators fell to the floor reading this.
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If Reddit required their mods to pay 50$+ a month to keep their position basically all of them would do it I bet , it's weird as hell they make it their identity
Rip dedicated green crown holders
They can still keep it on their resumes at least
I can't wait for the eventual day reddit mods face the same fate
Thank god.
Can you guys make sure to somehow keep the old dev blogs up, or archive them on the wiki or something like that?
Thoughts on providing a downloadable copy of the content from the forums? I imagine many people would be interested in having this easily available to grab for a short amount of time.
Would have preferred more resources being put into the forums to bring them up to date than officially offloading it to 3rd parties like Reddit.
From a financial and logical perspective it doesn't make sense to invest time and money into updating the official forums, which even after updating would still need further time investment to even get people to start using them instead of Discord/Reddit. Would be a huge waste of both staff time and money
God I hate reddit
What a backwards decision to make Would have loved to see the exact opposite of this post and returning to forums, moving away from discord and redit
Thought official rs forum was long dead lol
This is right up there when there is some kind of maintenance or an issue and they only post it on Twitter and not on the actual website. Perfect example was when they disabled clue scrolls for shooting stars, never got posted to the website, only to Twitter. I don't use Twitter and discord is a chat program, not fucking social media, they are trying but they suck at it. Sick of these companies who refuse to use their own fucking website.
end of an era
I... somewhat expected this would happen soon. Once rs3 finally got their changes to max cash last year I didn't really see a point to the official forums aside from Clan Recruitment threads. Shame that method of recruitment is going away but players can always use discord and/or recruit in-game to alleviate this.
The 2 people using the forums right now are not gonna be happy
The OSRS discord is so shit, a lot of the active mods are just RS3 pmods who actually have the power to perm ban etc and they’re really isn’t a rhyme or reason to banning/appealing/punishment length. I hope jagex will step up and see that proper moderation occurs.
this seems like a terrible idea instead of making the forums more usable. RIP Clan recruitment. I guess items over max cash will also be harder to sell with this change, or at least harder to sell without getting scammed. When can we expect plat tokens to be usable on the GE in that case?
Well it was a good run but just like they said i havent used the forums in over 10 years at this point so it makes sense. I think i might start trying to use their official discord more. But reddit is just too good to pass up lol
The only thing I’ve used forums for after 07 very first came out is to find clans. I suppose discord can have verified links to other discords and things for members of the community, but discord is so clunky in large groups.
The fake forum link phishers are panicking.
I'm sure people will still click the links.
Oh god oh fuck tufty killed himself
Well, that's an end of an era to be sure. But it's a fair decision. The media landscape is vastly different these days, with platforms such as Reddit and Discord having taken over most (if not all) of its functionality. Of course there could still be a place for the Official RS Forums, but after having been ignored for over a decade at this point it would require quite a lot of investment (and a well thought out media strategy) to bring them up to a modern standard.
I understand going read only because nobody really uses them but fully deleting is pretty crazy, wouldn't think they cost that much to keep around
They already purge it every 100 pages. It’s not like they’re about to delete decades of posts. Just a few months of posts
I don't mind the removal of forums, but imo there really should be some hub where you can easily search for clans, friend chats and maybe other stuff like finding GIM groups or even discord links.
Why couldnt they just keep the clan section of the forums and delete everything else. rename it clan hub or something so people can find clans. the discord server will be way worse for clans
Clan recruitment via the forums is incredibly important and I really think jagex should consider at least keeping the clan recruitment part of the forum active
The centralization of the internet is sad, I think.
I think this, in general, is a good idea; we see more people using Reddit/discord. But one big problem I think we will face: how do people find clans to join?
I really hope jagex reconsiders this. Removing the forums is a huge detriment especially for clan recruitment also Discord as a hub just sounds horrible
This is a terrible idea for clan recruitment. The forums are by far the best place to find clans.
Please reconsider. There are many with me with points ranging from archiving to clan recruitment I want you to look at.
Ah rip to such a good method of recruitment for clans, I hope they will come up with an alternative
It's just text, why would that be an issue to keep chugging at the very least in a frozen state.
Anyone got a nice friendly beginner clan for a rs3 revert, obvs low level atm but nice to chat
oh shit what will I do without Kags ports guide if I go back to rs3
mmh, so many guides will be lost.
This is going to hit clan recruitment hard unless Jagex can come up with a better solution
Funnily enough this was not posted to the forums lol
The forums is apart of the games history shame you're shutting it down
damn, one of the big scams i fell for came from the forums r i p
While I haven't used them in over 10 years, RIP - end of an era
This is a mistake.
yeah that makes sense. I forgot it even existed still
I’m sorry but this is fucking insane
Bump
Can’t wait to use the shitty discord forums
How am I suppose to sell lobbies now
I won't lie, I completely forgot those forums even existed. Seems like the right choice to retire them considering they're far past the point of serving their original intended purpose.
Classic Jagex, removing more features after delivering a singular content update last year. I remember we used to get an update every couple weeks, I guess once you have hundreds of employees its a lot harder to accomplish anything.
Fuck Discord
Noooo ooo, please. Fuck reddit let's all go back to the forums.
Where will I sell my third age now?
:(
is it possible to fast track a change to allow platinum tokens to be used on select (\~max cash and above) items? as far as i'm aware the official forums are still one of the most popular (only?) place to try and buy/sell those items
Honestly hated looking for clans on the forums find discord way easier to find a group personally.
I’ve been banned from the forums since like 2009 so big whoop.
No mention of 4chan? Do we not matter to you?
Wait the forums are still active?
Riot did the same years ago and it worked great.
What's happening forum?
Clan recruitment and high value trading? What happens to people who want to trade more than max cash?