An Impromptu Look At Wizbook

The professionalism of this review will once again be undercut by random images. I wouldn't have it any other way.

Some time ago, Wizard’s declared that Gleemax would shut down for a few weeks, and there was much dread. If the Gleemaxers’ forum was closed down, where would they hold their unending debates about how the Throne of Dominion and Eladrin Soldier and everything else in the game was broken and horrible and bad? Where would they yell at each other for their tastes in games, or their ideas of how three-dimensionality works in D&D 4e? To ENWorld or GITP?

Well, yeah, that was predictable.

Wizard’s also offered some encouragement in the form of promises of new features for Gleemax.

Well, the wait is over. Gleemax is dead, and in its place we have Wizbook.

That is not its name – I honestly don’t know what the shorthand would be for this, and I am too used to referring to Gleemax with a one-word name, so I decided to call it Wizbook due to its similarity to the social networking giant. Wizbook is social networking, a chat, a forum, a wiki, and future repository for spam.

I created a new account despite having one already because my old one didn’t have a name I liked.

First of all, I should share my opinion of the old Gleemax.

These yukkuri put it best:

The old Gleemax was serviceable as a forum, but it was ugly and failed to deliver many of the features it promised. So as the yukkuri say, it shtinks. Thankfully, Mishter did come to help us out after all, and we have Wizbook now in its place!

Wizbook At A Glance

First of all, I just want to commend them on cutting the URL down to size.

Creating a new account is simple but slightly bothersome. For one, it wants your ZIP code. This is a requirement. I’m not on many company web sites, so I can’t tell if this is just standard procedure in corporate-owned forums and such. But the vast majority of forums I go to have never required me to tell them this sort of thing. I know they have a privacy policy and privacy settings. But it is still a little weird for me. I wrote down some random numbers and it seemed to take my word for it.

The Web Site is in beta right now, and this is obvious. The password change system consistently produces a technical error, certain pages can load up blank and become impossible to reload, and the video stuff doesn’t seem to be up.

However, a lot of the features show promise. The Wiki, for example, lets you create your own personal pages, campaign pages, and frankly anything you can make fit under the umbrella of the game you are writing for. This is great. It gives everybody on the community a page to make all their own with pretty much everything they could get in an ordinary wiki. This is awesome.

Due to the way it asks for and allows you to display, and most importantly search for, zip codes and cities and the like, you can find gamers in your area fairly easily, make friends with them, and get a game going. The social networking aspect is robust. It is, unlike facebook (which I must admit I really don’t like) uncluttered and direct. I hope to God no weird apps or other doohickeys are added in the future. The no-frills interface of Wizbook offers everything you need for social networking and nothing more. It has status updates, groups you can start or join, personal photos and a search capable photo gallery, and an activity tracker.

Quibble: my RSS feeds don’t show up on my profile. You can follow RSS feeds through Wizbook using its feed manager. It’d be cool if other people could see what RSS feeds I am following though, in case I want to display a feed to friends from an external blog (like the one I’m writing on right now). I doubt I will ever make use of the internal blog since I don’t want to attach my content to Wizard’s community (their terms of service have that weird ownership clause that nobody likes), so that would be a pretty awesome alternative for me and I’m sure many others too.

So okay, all this is fun, but how do the forums work? Well, serviceably. They remind me of the Paizo forums in a bad way. They seem minimalistic to an extreme and it’s almost hard to keep my attention on the text or quickly scan for a forum I want in either the new or the classic views. Especially with that honking huge sidebar on the right with the list of popular topics and recent topics. I don’t know how realistic this suggestion is, but allowing people to configure how they view the forums would be quite splendid. First thing I’d do is remove that sidebar, stretch the forums out a bit and maybe change the colors.

Avatars and the like, thread subscriptions, PMs, and now a Multi-Quote function are part of the forum. You can insert photos or videos seemingly easily into forum posts. Unfortunately, there’s no Quick Reply box for those of us who don’t need the full interface and can hack out a post with the text tags hand-written and all. Or at least I couldn’t find one.

Current Conclusion

So overall, Wizbook, on first impression, is a colossal, monumental improvement over Gleemax. Unfortunately, the graphical improvements don’t obscure that it’s basically the same community – if you’re a D&Der or MTGer and you love rabidly arguing with people over the internet or talking about min-maxing or hating on other people’s games, well, Wizbook Forums are for you. For the rest of you, maybe you could use Wizbook solely for its social networking features and Wiki – because now, unlike before, you have that choice. Wizbook is not just a forum, and for me, that’s really the best improvement of them all.

Until next time, don’t leave your yukkuris out in the cold. They’ll melt.