Important message: Changes to GamesRadar UK forum

[Garth]

Hi UK Forum users,

This is an advance message to our community regarding the future of the UK GamesRadar forum: from the 4 September 2008, this forum will be locked and become read only.

You're probably wondering why, why are they taking our forum away from us?

To explain it we've created a little FAQ below:

Q: Oi, GamesRadar why the **** are you closing down our forum you ****** ********.

A: In the simplest terms, the GamesRadar UK forum requires a separate login to the main GamesRadar site community, known as RadarNation. That means if you sign up to RadarNation, you don't get access to the UK forum. Which is confusing. It's been like that for ever and we want to fix it.

Q: Pah, the only thing confusing me is why we have to start using RadarNation when we already have our own forum?
A: Yes, well the reason for us wanting to have everyon on the same forum is the new login you'll get from signing up to RadarNation will do more than just allow you to post on a forum.

Q: Right, like what?

On the 28 August we're introducing two new features to the main site. Firstly, we're giving everybody their own profile page on the site. You can have your own avatar or picture and include info about yourself. Later on in the year we'll add other stuff you can integrate into your profile.

Secondly, you'll be able to post comments on GamesRadar content directly under the article itself - or more simply put we're adding inline commenting to articles. It's a feature we've always admired in other sites like Digg and News4Gamers so we wanted to give our users the chance to give instant feedback and contribute to the content on the site in a more direct manner.

However, in order to do this, we need you all to have one, single login which you can get from signing up to RadarNation.

Q: What about the new forum. Is it different?

A: It's different software, but it does everything the existing UK forum does. You can see it here. It's being used by all GR users who signed up through RadarNation (you may have one already.)

Q: Hmm, well okay, but can we have our own GamesRadar UK thread on RadarNation?

A: It's kind of up to you. If the community overwhelmingly wants to have a territorial thread then we can make that happen, if you'd rather contribute to a 'global' forum with users from all over the world, we can do that too. Let us know what you'd prefer under this message.

Furthermore, if you want us to create a new UK section and bring across the post categories that exist on the UK forum we can do that too. Just let us know which ones you'd like to continue and we'll do our best to inititate this as soon as possible. We'll keep an eye on this thread til the 4 September and see what the general consensus is.

Q: What will happen to the GR UK forum after the 4 September?

A: From the 4 September we'll be locking the GR UK forum and making it read only. At the moment we're thinking we'll keep it accessible for six months before a complete switch off.

Any other questions you have mail them to gamesradar@futurenet.co.uk and we'll try and answer your query.

Finally, we'd like to say a big thank you to all our registered forum and moderators for making it the lively, outspoken, funny, controversial and downright notorious game discussion board on the Internet. Without you it would have been a lot of empty pages. We sincerely hope to see as many of you as possible on the new RadarNation forum as quickly as you can fill in the form. (Which is here). If your'e not coming, thanks anyway, and have fun wherever you go.

GamesRadar UK

banana splits.