…but what—why?

Azeroth is facing cataclysmic changes and WoW.com is no exception. Long-time readers will remember that our site lived at www.WoWInsider.com since we spun off from our mother site, Joystiq, lo those many years ago. Our corporate parent, AOL, owned the WoW.com domain, and about 15 months ago, we migrated our site to that address.

Whugh-uh? Our best guess that AOL.com believes that they can better monetize wow.com into something else, which is why they’re forcing WoW Insider to move to a much more ridiculous domain. In Internet terms, not everyone out here in the great misty beyond happens to be a video gamer—and even amid avid gamers not all of us are MMO players, not all play Warcraft, so on—but after being uprooted before, this doesn’t sit so well with us. We’d just gotten used to WoW.com.

The press release style post doesn’t give us any clue as to why the migration is happening, just that it’s coming along and we should be ready for it. So everybody pull out your most powerful RegEx scripting skillz and fix those bookmarks! (Personally, we voces might just search-replace our entire database in righteous fury and indignation—either that or we’ll write a WordPress filter.)

Still, we’d be lost without our beloved WoW Insider, so at least that’s not going away.

Link via… uh… WoW.com? (We can see this is going to get awkward.)