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12.12.2014

Introducing BidFiddlers.com - A New Gold-Making Forum


I'm proud to announce that I have created a new gold-making forum at BidFiddlers.com. I've been contemplating starting a gold-making forum ever since I started the blog back in 2010 but never felt the time was right.

After 4 years of blogging, I finally feel comfortable starting my own gold-making forum and I hope you'll enjoy it. Read on for more on why I started them and what I hope to accomplish with them.

A Bit of Background

The first question you might be asking is why did I decide to start a gold-making forum now? To answer that question I have to go back a few years.

Starting in 2005 I worked at an MMORPG development company where part of my job was interacting with the official game forums.

In 2008, I moved to another MMORPG game development company where a very large percentage of my time was interacting with our official game forums.

From both of those experiences, I became very familiar with all the different aspect and efforts that go into running, maintaining, managing and moderating public gaming forums.

For anyone that's been a part of running forums I'm sure you'll agree with me when I say that managing forums and interacting with the public (and in particular the gaming public) can be a very difficult job.

That said it can also be a very rewarding job and interaction on forums can be some of the most intimate and engaging interactions you can have on the internet.

I think what it really came down to in 2010 was that I really didn't have the desire or energy to run a gaming forum.

Why Now?

With Warlords of Draenor kicking all our collective butts gold-making-wise I think that now is a really great time for everyone in the Power Word: Gold community to have a place where we can all put our heads together and help each other learn how to make gold in Warlords of Draenor.

Other reasons why I'm excited about starting a forum now are more on the technical side.

Today I am much more familiar with forum software (Bid Fiddlers is running on Vanilla Forums) and installing and managing web software in general.

I've also been able to learn a lot more about responsive design and am proud to say that, similar to my recent responsive redesign of Power Word: Gold, I've been able to make Bid Fiddlers fully responsive.

This means that the forums will work just as well on your smartphones and tablets as it does on your desktops.

If you're like me you spend much more time these days consuming content on your smartphone and table than you do on your desktop computer.

I've put a lot of effort into making the mobile experience (especially the smartphone experience) on Bid Fiddlers top notch.

This means that all of use can waste our better utilize our downtime on our mobile devices reading and making posts about gold-making on Bid Fiddlers.

What Bid Fiddlers Is

Thoughts on what I'd like to see accomplished with the Bid Fiddler forums are the following:

  • Provide a safe and friendly environment where people new to gold-making can get their questions answered by experienced gold-makers.
  • Provide experienced gold-makers a laid-back place to discuss their ideas, theories and experiences with other gold-makers.
  • Provide a place where those new to writing about gold-making can share their gold-making thoughts, idea, and techniques.
  • A place where we the gold-making community can strengthen our bonds of friendship and comradery. 
  • Provide a free gold-making forum where all information is shared publicly, without restriction or cost.

Most of all I hope that Bid Fiddlers will be a place where people can enjoy the company of other gold-makers.

What Bid Fiddlers Isn't

In the past when I've heard or been involved in discussions about gold-making forums I've often heard concerns along the lines of:

  • There are already other gold-making forums (The Consortium, for example, which is excellent) why start another?
  • You're splitting the community up. Why not just let everyone congregate at once place.
  • We don't need another gold-making forum.
  • It's redundant.

You get the point. 

And the answer I've always had is that there is plenty of room for all sorts of gold-making resources to flourish. 

Just because there are already gold-making blogs doesn't mean that I don't want to see other gold-making blogs start and grow.

In a similar way, I don't see the need to worry about "splitting up the community" because I feel that each and every gold-making resource (whether it is a blog, podcast, livestream, or forum, etc.) will ultimately succeed or fail on its own merits.

There is no need for any gold-making resource out there to be worried or concerned that there are now more gold-making resources available to everyone.

I'm hoping that Bid Fiddlers will be a place that people enjoy coming to and find useful. If they ultimately end up not being that then that is completely up to me and those who choose to join me there.

Multipass

One neat thing about the software that we are using to run the forums is that we can embed the forums on other websites.

You can interact with and use the Bid Fiddler forums in two main places at the moment:
  • Embedded in the Power Word: Gold blog (look for the "Forums" link the the top of the page and select "Embedded" link to get to the Forums page here at Power Word: Gold).
  • At the full site at BidFiddlers.com.
What this embedding ability means is that not only will we have the ability to embed the Bid Fiddler forums here at Power Word: Gold but that we can allow the forums to be embedded in other places such as a page on someone else's gold-making blog or website.

While we are still in the early stages of the forums, if you have an interest in embedding the Bid Fiddlers forums on your own gold-making blog or website send us an email at [email protected] and let us know you're interested in beta testing the embedded forums on your blog/site.

Signing Up. Signing In.

We've tried to make using Bid Fiddlers as painless as possible. In addition to signing up for the forums with a good ol' email address, you can also sign into the forums using your Facebook or Twitter account.

If you're wanting to sign up for the forums with your Facebook or Twitter account use the "Login" button which will give you the option to sign in with those accounts or click their respective icons above the Login button.

(Note: In my early testing the Twitter sign in was working most of the time. If you have issues using the Twitter login let us know.)

Conclusion

In the end here I wanted to extend a hearty invitation for everyone reading this that is interested in interacting with other gold-makers and helping each other figure out this thing called making gold in World of Warcraft to hope on over and register for free BidFiddlers.com and start reading and posting.

There isn't much there now, but I expect that as time goes on we'll start to see all sorts of good gold-making discussion.

I'm especially excited to see all of the discussion about making gold in Warlords of Draenor because frankly I'm having a bit of a hard time getting a handle on it so far.

Also, the forums are brand new and with any project like this there are bound to be bugs and kinks to work out. If you have any issues signing up for or using the forums please let me know at [email protected].

In addition, if you have feedback for the forums specifically you can leave that for us in the Forum Feedback & News category in the forums.

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