The RPGBA is Dead! Long Live The RPGBA!

A couple of years ago, Jeff Brissette and me (actually mostly Jeff), started the RPG Blog Alliance as an alternative to the RPG Bloggers Network. The latter used a pretty outdated and ill-fitting software which was pretty hard to maintain. We thought there might be a better way to do things and Jeff decided to write a blog aggregation software from scratch.

Many people told us that they don’t think a new blog network was needed, but the success of the RPGBA proved them wrong pretty quickly. As of today the RPGBA has about 639 members. Of course not every blog is still active and not everyone posts once per day, but overall there’s still a lot of activity. So why is the RPGBA closing down?

Blog networks used to be very helpful back in the day. The RPG Bloggers Network community helped me a lot when I started this blog. It brought me readers, helpful advice and I even made some friends in the community. But nowadays social networks like Facebook or Google+ are way more important if you want to get connected to other bloggers and get blog updates out to your readers.

Another reason is that the RPGBA’s software has become the victim of several hacker attacks over the last years. Fixing the loopholes used by the hackers and repairing the damage done takes a lot of time and effort. Over time the question arised if it was still worth it. When we started out we wanted the RPGBA not only a blog aggregator but also a community. Alas the latter aspect never came to fruition.

Overall we came to the conclusion that it was probably the best to shut the RPGBA down. As far as I know it should be offline in about 2 days’ time. But some of the former RPGBA members want to keep the spirit of the RPG Blog Alliance alive on Google+. Scot Newbury created a Google+ community, everyone can join (Members have to get approved though). There we can help other RPG bloggers by sharing resources, experiences, and discuss RPG blogging in general.

So while the old RPGBA may be dead, the new RPGBA is alive and kicking and will hopefully be a great community for veteran and newbie RPG bloggers alike!