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I, for some reason, cannot follow up in links inside the wizard of the coasts forums. For example: http://community.wizards.com/forum/previous-editions-character-optimization/threads/1101061 . In that guide there is a link, it is called "DRAGONFIRE HANDBOOK - UPDATE THE SECOND! - LINKY" and leads me to http://community.wizards.com/?p=14249874#post14249874 . And when i click on it i am lead to something else, pic shows what i see when i click that link.enter image description here

Might be a dupe, in that case. Sorry!

Simon
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Answer: Because of how the forums have changed, the author of the Dragonfire Adept handbook never updated the page and the page itself has not been saved.

That link goes to a http://gleemax.com page. Gleemax was the old community website that Wizards ran in 2007 and 2008. With the advert of 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons they replaced it with D&D Inside and shut down Gleemax.

The content from those forums was saved by individuals, and not Wizards of the Coast. So when they wiped the website all posts on it were lost, including the Dragonfire Handbook that you are looking for. Janus Jones, the author of the Dragonfire Adept Handbook has not updated the guide to reflect this, so a dead link remains.

Edit: The page still lives!

Thomas Jacobs
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The reason that happens is since that thread was created back in 2007 and now Wizards of the Coast has had at least one major revamp of their website, including the forums. And during this revamp they broke all of the links to their old forums, the content may still be there, but the link has changed.

You can tell this is the case because if you copy the link it points to http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?p=14249874#post14249874 and not http://community.wizards.com/?p=14249874#post14249874. Gleemax was a failed attemt Wizards had at a social networking site for gamers that closed in 2009.

To see if the content is still there you can try Google searches, or see if the Wayback Machine archived it at all, but unfortunately I do not know any easy ways to find the pages that were originally linked to.

diego
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You can find these on the wayback machine at archive.org:

Dragonfire adept handbook

First update

Second update

JohnP
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  • How do you use the wayback machine? – Simon Mar 23 '15 at 17:21
  • @Simon - It's basically a site that maintains archive of crawled websites. It's not 100%, but you can enter a URL and it will show you the snapshots of the site that it has access to. In these cases, I took the WotC link, hovered and copied the gleemax links and entered them at the archive to get the crawled web pages. – JohnP Mar 23 '15 at 17:28