Hogwarts hopefuls are going to have to wait a little longer. Pottermore, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter themed entertainment site, will not be admitting new users as early as planned.
Pottermore opened to 1 million beta testers late this summer, and was expected to admit new users this October. The Pottermore shop, which will eventually be the exclusive vendor for Harry Potter e-books, will delay its opening until the first part of 2012.
But the site will be offline for at least three days for maintenance, reports the Pottermore Insider.
Today at Story World Conference 2011, transmedia and interactivity expert Jeff Gomez, who previously spoke about Pottermore to Forbes, offered a possible reason for the site’s shutdown. Simon Staffans tweeted Gomez’s response:
“[One million] kids ran through Pottermore in an instant, now nothing to do. Must ‘feed the beast,’” a tweet quotes Gomez as saying.
The Pottermore Insider describes this week’s changes as “technical.”
“There won’t be any obvious differences in the site’s content,” reads the official blog post.
Many fans are just eager to get back to brewing potions. Users are tweeting their frustrations about the site’s erratic schedule.
“I’m gettin’ kinda really really annoyed with this @pottermore thing. Just open, we don’t care if you close it now and then to fix things,” wrote @kelsassy.
“i sorta don’t care about pottermore anymore, considering they’ve once again delayed entry,” wrote @lawsquared.
Image via Pottermore.com.
