When you first come around a new page, or the retrofit of an already existing page, there are many questions that arise around your personal likes or dislikes of various features. I could care less for groups, forums, chats, videos or even blogs, but that's just me, I can have them in a lot of other places, or worst of all, implement them myself. What is the real deal maker or breaker, however, is the usability, technical maturity of a page, this is what will make users beam with joy or spoil their week, as this is what concerns anyone, whether they like the concepts or not. And let's face it, WOTC/onesite has many dealbreakers in this current system.

1: Documentation

When i see something new, and this is radically new compared to the old VBB forums, there should be some kind of newbie-guide around. Now that it doesn't exist, is there some kind of action-related help, or at least a link to an html/wiki tutorial? Again, the answer is no. A graphical editor seems to be the solution of choice for all that. But where are the features you'd need most? You have to digg through masses of html tutorials to find what you could or could not do, and this is nothing an ordinary user should have to go through.

2: Consistency

So, HTML is allowed. Fine. I used to be a web-developer earlier in my career, and am now managing a governmental site with around 150.000 users. Pull out those old HTML skills, and scribble on - or so I thought. HTML is allowed, but nowhere close to all tags, and even worse, far from all attributes. Many a useful thing is stripped out for security reasons, that much I can understand - but where is this documented? Where can you see what is allowed and what is not? Figuring out everything by trial and error, is bound to give a lot of people either headaches, or bring them towards resigning and non-using the features.

This goes as far as this: the TinyMCE Editor used in this system as HTML editor supports a lot of stuff, like anchors or links that get opened in new windows. However, their own system strips that HTML code out like it is seriously dangerous, leaving you with a screwed up post if you are lucky, or without a post if you are not.

3: State of the Art

Well, this is something I can forgive a site if it does not use every latest hype like google wave or AJAX. But really - there are a lot of features that ARE standard for any good community or forums system.

1. The ability to see whatever you subscribed to. This is no joke. Every System where you can subscribe to something, is bound to have a page where you can look at it, AND see the changes.
2. The ability to customize your own "home"-page. Not everyone has the same needs, or wants to see the same stuff. The same thing that's possible with RSS-feeds, should be possible with pretty much any section in your own "home"
3. RSS for groups, and maybe forums as well. Really, this technology has been around for so long, you'd consider it standard to a point that hurts. Every major site out there has RSS feeds.
4. Adaptable Layouts. Skinning a site to a relatively fixed screen? That's 1990's style. At work, screen to small. At home, screen to large. I now needed to adjust for both via Stylish... which should not be necessary.
5. Low Bandwidth Themes/sections. I do not own an iphone or use any other portable internet, but this is something they neglected.
6. Accessibility. It is very easy to make a page that is also usable for disabled or handicapped people. But as it stands at the moment, they'd rather not try anything in here. Contrasts are horrible, and the HTML lends itself to many things, but definitely not screen readers. Read up on section 508 or WAI.

4: Color me up.

As it stands, the WOTC pages have two major problems:
A) the default color scheme is lacking
B) the current themes are very similar, thus rendering people with specific likes or dislikes unable to escape the "all white"-mania that is currently going on.

5: The Legacy

Yes, when designing a new system, you have to spill some beans. You have to go on. You have to change stuff. But never, ever, forget where you come from. The current change made many of the people who just wanted places to post unhappy, due to the unavailability of the old and well-used BB-codes, and due to certain issues with data-transfer from the old to the new system gone bad. If you remove such a thing as BB, you'd better have a replacement plan for everything old in place, or it will get as far as the situation is currently on many roleplaying or the CO board: people are scrambling, trying to recover whatever they can do from google or various other sources in order to preserve their work.

6: The Future

So, where is Wizards headed with this Community Site? I honestly don't know. I'd like to know, however. They nowhere mentioned what their intent behind this site is, just that it's newer and a community now. I guess it shows, why certain areas here are really neglected - There seems to be no real overarching plan, except for making a newer, better, more sophisticated community page to draw in more people and keep them here. This is a good company goal, but it should not be the only reason to do such a site.

Now, that I've posted two pages of complaints, I also need to give some opinions on what WOTC absolutely needs to do:

• Get a better concept. Community is good, groups are OK. But as it currently stands, groups will explode, and most of them will stay very small due to the sheer amount of them. The end result will be, that even prospering communities of PbP games will suffer, since noone will find them by accident anymore. The only way to alleviate this, would be to advertise those groups better. (instead of featuring every MTG group around the planet)
• Get some of the things back to state of the art. In some ways, the old forum was more state of the art than the current. Especially problematic places are the WYSIWYG editor TinyMCE, and the whole WIKI - at least support all proper wiki tags, redirects, and fix those links.
• Make more themes. You've had like 50 themes on the old forums, and now we are stuck with 3 who basically are the same save for some backgrounds pictures. 
• Before the next change, ask your community more questions.
• And last, but not least: Learn from this, and make the transition more smooth. nothing would be stopping you from keeping the old forums alive for a little while longer, and test this thingy in parallel mode with more than just a few odd-out users.

So, that's about it. Gotta go and drown myself now, for posting a BLOG.