In case you haven’t been keeping up with the kerfuffle on the forums, there has been an issue involving twitter that caused Turbine to shut down the Dev Tracker on the forums.
The Dev Tracker is a page that displays forum posts just from official Turbine staff so it’s a great location to find official information about LOTRO straight from Turbine sources.
No clear reason was given as to why Turbine wanted the Twitter feed to stop. Turbine was calling the account a “spam bot” and a bot it truly was. I don’t know if it was really spamming anyone since one elects to subscribe a twitter feed and has the option to block ones you don’t want to see. There must be other reasons either technical or just political (as in considered harmful to Turbine image) as to why this twitter feed had to stop. I really don’t understand what the hub-bub was about but I can only see things from our side of the fence. You can visit this forum post for more discussion on this topic.
The result was Turbine taking down the dev tracker today and have installed a new dev tracker. It works exactly like the old one so you may not even notice any difference. If you had this page bookmarked, your link will need to be updated.
At any rate the Dev Tracker link on the forums does work again and I have to say I have missed it!
October 26, 2012 at 3:36 pm
There are 2 main reasons I could see for them wanting to stop the twitter feed:
1. The twitter bot is causing technical problems, possibly by sending too many requests too often.
2. The twitter account is not an “official spokesperson”, and they want to prevent it having the appearance of being so.
Either of these could be valid reasons for wanting it shut down.
Sapience has said that if they are unable to resolve things with whoever is running that twitter account, they will disable the dev tracker again: http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.php?485298-Sapience-Celestrata-and-Clover-s-posts-no-longer-in-the-Dev-Tracker&p=6496288#post6496288
October 26, 2012 at 3:39 pm
Yup those are the two reasons I see as well (as stated in the post)
Lets hope it doesn’t get shut down again. I didn’t realize how much I relied on turbine data from that until it was gone!
October 26, 2012 at 8:39 pm
Never let it be said I can’t restate the obvious!
October 26, 2012 at 7:55 pm
Wonder if they purged it to try and prevent any awkwardness from this weeks layoffs.
If it wasnt officially official then surely they’d have tried to clamp down and control it before now. The timing seems a bit too much of a coincidence.