the Hobbit Hole

Well, not long ago Imaginvoa seemed to have acquired my formerly favorite Comic Book News Site Newsarama. They totally revamped the main site with a bold new MUCH more modern look that I will admit was sorely needed. However a few days ago they decided to turn off the original vBulletin powered forums that most agree was the heart & soul of the site. They replaced it with a forum running on the Pluck system. The Pluck forum looks nice but lacks a LOT of web forum standards most message board veterans like myself rely upon. The most basic thing I miss and frankly cannot really use a message board without is the Email Notification of new posts to subscribed threads. How the hell can one follow a thread without that? I’m certainly NOT going to live on a thread and keep hitting F5 for days on end.

As bad as that omission is my main beef with the transformation is three-fold:

1) They chose NOT to import any old posts! WTF?????????

2) They chose NOT to import any of previous members account info. This means our post count & original join date are DELETED and reset to ZERO.

3) Now here is the biggest insult to injury. Now I could easily live with point #2 except for this:

If you have a forum account with OTHER Imaginova “communities” like for instance space.com or livescience.com you can stay logged in and participate on Newsarama’s new comic message boards. This means you can have a 2005 (or earlier) join date with 20,000+ post while posting on Newsarama. WTF?? Who thought THIS affront was a Good Idea?????????????

So as far as I’m concerned Imaginova ruined Newsarama. And although the new site LOOKS great it’s rapidly looking less and less like a Comic News site with the front page full of articles about non comic related movies like Kung Fu Panda. Whatever.

I will certainly miss Matt Brady, Vaneta Rogers and the gang but for now I’ll be spending more time with the competition over at Comic Book Resources.