New official forums without RealID!

Read it yourself.

Now I’d like to take a moment to remind you about how awesome the rest of the announced changes are!

Players will have the ability to rate up or rate down posts so that great topics and replies stand out from the not-so-great; low-rated posts will appear dimmer to show that the community feels that they don’t contribute effectively to the conversation, and Blizzard’s community team will be able to quickly and easily locate highly rated posts to participate in or to highlight discussions that players find worthwhile.

This, alone, is going to make a huge difference. It’s been a long time coming, and will address a large portion of trolling.

Individual topics will be threaded by context, meaning replies to specific posts will be grouped together, making it easier for players to keep track of multiple conversations within a thread. We’re also adding a way for Blizzard posters to “broadcast” important messages forums-wide , to help communicate breaking news to the community in a clear and timely fashion. Beyond that, we’re improving our forum search function to make locating interesting topics easier and help lower the number of redundant threads, and we have more planned as well.

This will make everything more readable.

Honestly, with the exception of their reversed decision to force gamers to use their real names, this was an amazing announcement! Now that they’ve given us what we asked for, we can start focusing on the good parts of the announcement. And resubscribing, right Gnomeaggedon? :P

So aside from community voting and threading, what other ideas do you guys have that would make the forums a better place? Off the top of my head, I suspect forcing people to choose a single character that will show on all their posts would be a good first step. No more anonymous level 1 alts from another server bashing recruitment threads. Additionally, I’d like to see a PM system, maybe integrated with in-game mail.