Unions are closing

http://uk.gamespot.com/features/in-which-we-announce-some-pretty-big-changes-6413315/

The Atheism Union has not been active for a while, although we have had 3 new joiners in the last month!

Writings here have been a good source of information about all sorts of religious views and other philosophies. It is a shame that the forum will be taken down permanently and the thoughts of the many people contributing positively to the threads here will be lost. Perhaps the unions will be available on a web archive site somewhere. Who knows?

My personal thanks to all those who have contributed to the union and chosen to discuss their minds with others.

"AUGUST 22 UPDATE: A lot of you have expressed disappointment that Unions will be going away (some of you have even signed a petition to keep them around!), and while we totally understand your frustration, we will not be able to keep Unions around.

That said, what we CAN do is offer Union leaders an opportunity to have their Unions converted into standard, public forums on the new site. This would, of course, mean that they lose the ability to control who can post in their forums, but it would ensure that all existing forum threads would stick around, and their communities would continue to live on, albeit in a different format. We'll be finalizing some details on this and reaching out to Union leaders soon." 

Thanks for your campaign to keep unions alive Michael. I will watch out for any notifications about the union conversion to the new forum structure and ensure the content of this union will stay alive on the new site. PLease do let me know if there is somewhere I should register interest for this process to start. Thanks again.

It seems like they're using the Giantbomb web system now. I think it was created by Dave Snider, who I think had a hand in the original Gamespot site we're using too. As a regular user of Giantbomb and only a user of Gamespot unions now, I do have a few concerns about the way this is going:

The GB system does not have as much user functionality as the old GS system, hence I think the loss of unions, etc.

The latest re-skin of the Giantbomb site this year made the site go down for a couple of weeks. I suspect the same will happen for Gamespot because of the much larger traffic volumes on the site and issues with balancing loads.

The talked about use of a "quest" system in Gamespot is based on an old quest system used in Giantbomb that is not used there anymore. As a result, user "levels" on Giantbomb have stagnated. Questing seemed rather under-utilised on Giantbomb when it was functional.

The GB forum tech is not great and Giantbomb forums are somewhat lamentable, as they always have been. This could be somewhat down to the overzelous moderation team there too.

Dave Snider has left CBS/Gamespot/Giantbomb, so in a similar way to the way the GS tech evolved, the new tech may also have issues going forward as new features and fixes get added without the original architect's vision.

The Gamespot re-skin looks so similar to Giantbomb that it shows a lack of vision from the design team to differentiate the sites in a meaningful way. I guess this makes it easier to amalgamate the sites and seems like the most likely corporate goal. I predict that The Giantbomb team of Jeff, Brad, Vinny and Drew will fully re-join Gamespot again to draw more people to Gamespot editorial content.