[Ross]

I know anything in the "Obscure Texts" section of TIL is unofficial, but what about forum posts by developers that are archived on the site? I'm leaning towards unofficial.

[Rowena]

From my understanding, and I could be wrong here, Bethesda only considers content "official" or "canonical" if it's part of a published work. Developer posts, whether made here or elsewhere, may not technically be official but I think they're close enough to be accepted. It's very murky, if a developer clarifies matters is that different than releasing new lore? What if it does or does not contradict any existing lore? What if the content comes from the library of unreleased TES documents?

I think this murkiness is sufficient to keep the content from being official but with developer comments it's something of a technicality. If Todd Howard came in and clarified something about the disappearance of the dwarves I think people would be generally OK accepting that information as true, and if not wholly official now likely to become so in a future release.

[Bethany Watkin]

Ah. That clears it up.

[saharen beauty]

I think of it in the same way the various authors within the TES universe (http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Quill-Weave for example) often have their own opinions and misconceptions about what actually happened.

The fact that several in-game sources have different views on history and the "facts" of the lore, makes it easier for me to assume that what a dev says in a post has about as much weight/credence as some book you might read in game or NPC you might talk to.

Does Quill-Weave, for example, have the final say on how/what the Doomstones do, just because she is in the game? I think a dev can make posts that might be truer than what we find in-game in this case.