Edit #2: It's past 4:30 A.M. here, so I'm going to have to jump off to bed. I didn't quite get to every comment, I'm sorry, but I think I caught most of them. Please feel free to keep leaving them and I'll check in when I'm back and working tomorrow.
As many of you have already heard, there have been a number of changes to the Wowhead team over the past few months, and this, coupled with some long-standing issues and complaints, has led to a lot of speculation around the future of Wowhead.
This post realistically could have been 10,000 words long, talking about all the challenges we’re facing as a team right now, what we’re trying to do to move forward, and a list of 50 different “promises” we’re going to make to keep Wowhead on track.
Let’s not do that. Instead, I want to talk about four of the biggest issues that are currently being talked about regarding Wowhead, and finally address them directly as the new head of the content team here.
Firstly, who am I?
My name is Blainie - some of you may know me from nearly a decade of working at Icy Veins, with the majority of that time being spent on the management team. Others may know me as Valks, a troubled phase where I thought changing my username was cool - it wasn’t, sadly.
I have been working with the Wowhead content team for nearly 2 years now in various roles, ranging from consultant to guide writer to “hey, do this.” I recently moved into managing the content team this year, and I think it’s fair to say that it hasn’t been the smoothest transition. A lot has happened.
It’s been a while since Wowhead has directly addressed the community to talk about Wowhead, and this has led to a lot of speculation, as well as the community that supports this website and all of the people that work on it, not really feeling like they are being heard.
We’re hoping to change that moving forward and be a bit more present with our users - that isn’t to say that I’ll be pinging your webhooks with a new “statement” every day, but from time to time, you’ll hear about new updates, features, or occasionally, just talking about Wowhead.
The “Biggest” Question - AI?
TL;DR
Wowhead does not use AI to write anything. We know there's been speculation and we have firm rules and processes regarding this.
This might seem a bit rich coming from someone with “AI” in their name, but Wowhead doesn’t write content on the website with AI. Everything you read is written by various team members, whether it be news writers, staff, or class theorycrafters - it’s all written by us.
Despite there being some pretty blatant use of AI within the community, Wowhead gets a lot of complaints about AI, and we’ve never really shared our stance on it.
Putting it frankly, if a writer is suspected of using AI to write their content for them, they are investigated. If proof is found, they are terminated and replaced. That’s it. There are no special circumstances, no “whoops, I didn’t know this is AI” - if we find it, we remove it, and replace it with someone passionate enough to put the time and effort into making a guide that the community deserves.
We have no plans to change this stance in the future. I want to be clear that this is something that was discussed a while back, but the team that is still here today pushed back hard enough to make sure that it did not become a reality - and with that, the leadership beyond Wowhead itself was shown that AI isn’t something that is acceptable on this website.
Ads, Ads, and Ads
TL;DR
Ads help run the site, but we're working on making them less intrusive, less offensive, and less likely to pollute the content you're here to see.
This isn’t a new complaint, but it gets revived a lot. Over these past years, not enough has been done to address the growing concerns and complaints that users were sharing regarding ads on Wowhead. There are some complaints where, sadly, we can’t do anything about them - a good example of this is “bad ads”. If a user receives an ad that is NSFW, as an example, we don’t choose to serve that ad to the user. We can report it if you tell us you received it, but at no point does Wowhead “choose” to serve a bad or malicious ad. We do everything we can to work with providers to stop them, and reporting them can help, but I’ve worked on multiple websites like Wowhead, and bad ads have always been a pain point.
I want to be very clear that, in an ideal world, we would say “no ads for everyone!” and we could provide everything Wowhead has to offer without them, but we can’t. It’s not possible to run a website of this size without ads.
Now, with that being said, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it has to be the ad setup we have right now. We have been actively discussing a solution for the ads problem on Wowhead for the past weeks and are making progress - but it can’t be done overnight. There are changes that have to happen that take time to ensure that the company doesn’t just lose a massive amount of money while we try to figure out what to do.
Ideally, I’d give you all a solution right now, something we can “promise”, but I don’t have anything concrete enough to do that. We will continue to discuss this, and I want to be clear that it isn’t just “this is a problem”, but actively trying to work out how to best balance funding a website like Wowhead, while making sure that users and their experience on the website are always a consideration, if not the absolute priority.
Performance - Why can’t I keep Wowhead open while playing WoW?
TL;DR
There's a lot behind this and it isn't an easy fix. We need time, but we're actively working on this.
This is another long-standing topic - why does Wowhead crash my browser? Why does it take up so much memory?
We’re working on it. It’s being discussed actively alongside the ads discussion because they are interlinked, and changes to the ad setup we have will have an impact on this, but it goes beyond that to some degree.
We can have the best content ever, incredible guides, perfect tooling, all of it - but if the website is a pain to use for users across the world, then that’s all for nothing. I want to have this fixed just as much as any of you - as a user, but also as the head of the team making that content, and for the developers we have working on Wowhead.
We have a lot of passionate people still working at and with Wowhead: they invest a lot of time and effort into trying to make the best content and tools possible for the community, as well as all of the “support” staff we have, and I don’t want their hard work being brushed off or tainted because of a memory leak (just an example, please don’t start posting screenshots showing memory leaks - or do, feedback is welcome).
The Content
TL;DR
It's our job to provide the best content possible for the community, but if we don't listen to our users, we won't know if we're succeeding in that. Talk to us and tell us if we're doing a good or bad job.
Talk to us.
I mean this in the absolute most direct way possible - talk to us, whether it be to me directly, one of the staff, a writer, whatever. Give us feedback if you think we aren’t doing a good job. We want to create content for users that is useful, that players actually want to see, and there are times when we only find out about it in a Reddit comment because that specific piece of feedback was never raised to us directly.
We have set up a new avenue for users to actually get in touch with us, as well as made some changes to how on-site feedback is treated. Previously, there were definitely some heavy-handed rules in place regarding negative comments and feedback - this isn't the case anymore. We are going to be taking a step back site-wide regarding feedback, and as long as it's constructive, we're leaving it there. Please don't abuse this: you can tell us you hate a type of news article, you can tell us that a guide is bad, but tell us why. We will also have zero tolerance for any personal attacks or people just spamming curses and slurs.
For the new way to contact us, it's via the email [email protected] - if you send us an email here, you will get in touch with not only me, but multiple members of the content and community teams. This email is not intended for reports about outdated pages or an error in a guide - this is specifically for users to have a way to reach out to us and give us feedback on how we're doing, if there are any problems with our current work/strategy, or tell us what you'd like to see on Wowhead.
I'm sure some of you noticed that there was an experiment with editorial posts. It didn’t work; the community was loud and clear, you did not want those posts in your news feed, so we stopped them, and our news is a lot more focused on the games. I will caveat this by saying that there are still some editorials being put out, but so far, based on the feedback we’ve seen, the reception seems more positive. This includes things like class editorials on Retail or the Classic+ release date speculation article.
We will continue to experiment, but we will do so with a focus on ensuring that the foundation is solid; we want to make sure that the Wowhead you have all come to support over these years is still there. We will continue to datamine, continue to work with the class experts from the community, and make sure that we’re getting any news on WoW into your webhooks and on the front page as soon as we can.
We will do everything we can to provide the best WoW resource possible to the wider community and our users, but ultimately, we will not be able to do that without the community itself, so please, talk to us, tell us when you like something, when you don’t like something, and we’ll do our best to make Wowhead what it should be.
