The World of Avlis

http://blog.bioware.com/2016/07/29/conc ... ur-forums/

All of Bioware's game forums they operate will cease to exist besides Star Wars: The Old Republic. If there's any threads or info you want to archive, you have until August 26th October 25th.

Because we know there is a lot of information on there you may want to keep, the public boards will remain in a read-only state until October 25, 2016. After that date, they will be taken down.

You have a few more months than that, but yeah, sad news. I'll be keeping a copy of the NWN stuff here (I have several boards saved for offline use/backups), though I'm sure someone will add it to the NWN Omnibus thing as well.

* I'd make a backup of these forums too, but krackq would shoot me for crawling through all 1,010,926 posts and 96,252 topics (compared to 105,045 posts and 9,948 topics for BioWare's NWN1 and 85,156 posts and 7,519 topics for NWN2 forums) This isn't the first time we hit 1 million either. The forum has been pruned a few times over the last decade+.

They never seem to respond to posts on SW:TOR either

I would be interested in a backup of these fora. I'd like a copy myself. Not that I think any of it is going anywhere, but it's the Internet. I'm stunned that not only has avlis the PW survived all these aeons, but that all our ancient ramblings are also still here!

That's kind of depressing, considering they're even closing up the Mass Effect: Andromeda forum...and the game hasn't even been released. Seems they're trying to make it all about social media platforms and not forums anymore.

The majority of BioWare's forums are read only now, and will be gone soon.

There have been several different backups and new things done to make sure the information isn't lost, and so we have places to continue discussing things. The most popular seems to be the redone Neverwinter Vault Forums (now available with https and other stuff on the way still), so I'd suggest making an account there (if you don't already have one) and join the fun.

There is also the NWN1 Section of The Nexus Forums, though they don't look like they have much backed up from BioWare's. A few other forums have scraped the old stuff and added it to their sites as well, but I think the Vault will end up being the most popular choice.

For those of you who want a copy of the old* BioWare NWN1 (and NWN2) posts, you can grab a scrape from here on the vault as MS SQL DB Files. Fairly complete from the looks of them, which is pretty impressive with BioWare's annoying topic numbering system (and total lack of any hierarchy between forums and topics).

* By "old", I mean the redone forums that are shut down now (read only for a few more months maybe). If you want the even older forum stuff (and tons of other content), it is also available via NWN Omnibus on the vault as well.

Read Me Stuff wrote:An ENORMOUS collection of searchable NWN reference material in one place!

What is the NWN Omnibus?
It is an attempt to gather the majority of NWN reference material together in one place and allow very quick keyword searching against all of the documents at once. It includes reference documents as well as forum threads.

...

What program drives the NWN Omnibus?
The Omnibus is a customized version of a portable DocFetcher (link is external) distribution.

A bit of topic necromancy, but hopefully for a good reason. I keep forgetting to post about this, so yay for finally remembering.

There were a few different attempts to save the old (2nd) Bio-boards, but a nice and simple site has (what looks to be) all the old stuff for us to search. Nothing fancy (I hate extra fluff anyway), but the Bioware Archive is exactly that. It should have all the old topics from when the shutdown happened.

You'll still need Omnibus (see above) or the Internet Archive to dig through the V1 forum topics, like my favorite stealth details one here.