User:Hyarion/Opinion of TheOneRing.net

From Tolkien Gateway
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Now that The Lord of the Rings (film series) movies are long gone we've started to see fan sites dwindle, even TheOneRing.net, the largest and most well known fansite, is showing signs of depletion.

This year they have bumped their New York convention 'ELF' up early even though The One Ring Celebration has just finished. The convention now sits just a couple weeks after The Gathering of the Fellowship. Why Tolkien fans need two conventions so close together in one place is beyond me. The interesting part comes when actors who attend 'ELF' are supposabley forced to sign a contract which states they will not attend any convention within 3 months, thus ruling out anyone attending the earlier GotF or any other convention that is. They also seem to only post news relating to the event on their site if it contains something revolving around the fact that Ringers will be shown at the event. It seems after their DVD flop, "Ringers", they are trying to pull themselves back to the top financially by cutting the competition down. For more information on the DVD check out my review of the film.

On top of this just the other day I personally was banned from their IRC Chat server from which I had been attending for a few years now. No explanation, no warning, just banned forever. When asked the reason we were given with, "because of the insidious spread of Tolkien Gateway propaganda." An interesting concept, and rather laughable when Tolkien News had probably 3 articles on the main page linking to TheOneRing.net. Just days later anyone remotely related with Tolkien Gateway or who even linked to the website or was friends of mine began to become banned. Entire channels were barred from the server after being there for years, simply because they were rumored to be friends of ours. Almost 10 people have been banned now, these are users who have been visiting the server regularly for upwards of 5 years.

What makes this interesting is the fact that while all this is going on TheOneRing.net had posted, on the main page of their website, a link to another IRC Server which would be holding a chat with the actor who played Deagol. Either the IRC Moderators have become power hungry and forgot to mention to the news posters to disregard any other Tolkien sites, or they simply have something against this network. Even this seems unlikely as just a couple months ago they were fine with posting in the main channel that we were having a giveaway on our network.

Please keep in mind I’m not trying to bash the website, they have been around for quite some time and even I still go there for news, but it just seems they refuse to change, we’ve seen the same theme on their website all these years, relatively no new ideas or features have been implemented, is this the right approach to pleasing the fans? Or are fans finding other choices to fulfill their Tolkien need?

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