Wow. When I initially had the idea for Waves, I didn’t think one of my first posts would be about the demise of the Gamesradar UK forum.
While it seems a waste to destroy the community, undo all the hard work people have put into the place and erase all that history from the internet, to be honest I feel that for the people who run the Gamesradar main site, it was the best thing to do. I saw this closure coming two years ago, although I was sure it would happen within weeks or months, not years.
You see, a couple of years back, the Radarnation ID was introduced and it gave membership to the new Radarnation forum. I found it quite suspicious at the time that Gamesradar would need two separate fora. But with the news of last week it all became clear; A Radarnation ID would enable users to comment on articles on the main Gamesradar site, as well as letting them have a profile page on the site. GR wants in on social networking?
And so, the UK forum would be closed, and the Radarnation forum would become the primary focus with all these new features integrating site and community. As I said earlier I believe this to be a good thing for the guys that run Gamesradar, it should lead to a better feeling of unity between the main site and the one remaining forum, Radarnation. Also, given my estimate that 75% of users on the UK forums didn’t actually use the main Gamesradar site, it should free up some of their bandwidth and resources. No longer will a member of Gamesradar staff have to spend a portion of their day dealing with the many troubles and petty squabbles of the UK forums.
Another thing that could possibly have affected their decision was that many, many users used custom style sheets to block the adverts on the Gamesradar forums. Funny thing is, the moderators approved of this and the code was stickied in two parts of the forum, effectively giving two fingers to the Gamesradar Admin. You could almost picture the scene at Future Publishing HQ, in the canteen. One executive turns to another and says “Hmm, we’re not getting much advert revenue from the UK forum”, the other replies “Well, let’s get rid of it then”. But I’m sure I’m way off with that one.
It’s not all bad news though, a new forum has risen from the ashes, in a pretty speedy fashion. The community needed a new home and some of the core users got together to fund their new home. GRcade has picked up exactly where the Gamesradar UK forums left off, and with three sites to garner new users (admittedly none of them have the clout of Future Publishing, who advertise their sites in their many magazines every month), the future looks rosy for the community that once occupied the Gamesradar UK forum.
