Site Annoucement: Reader Blogs Coming To An End

Reader blogs are something I started on SAB some time ago. They used to be open for anyone to register, but I closed that off after an upgrade left me incapable of keeping up with all the spam blogs being created. Yet still, years later, the core group of people who use them post multiple times per week.

Unfortunately, what enables the reader blogs is a flavor of CMS – WordPress MU, specifically – which a lot of hosting services simply won’t support any more.

We’ve been struggling with our hosting here on SAB for a while now, as most of you have probably been able to tell from the outages and slow page loads. To fix that we’re moving to new hosting, but that means getting rid of the reader blogs.

So, unfortunately, if you have a reader blog it’ll be going away on Friday evening. Which doesn’t mean much for the rest of SAB. In terms of traffic, the Reader Blogs bring in maybe 400 or 500 unique visits a week, and the commenting seems pretty light.

If you’re interested in keeping what you’ve posted you can certainly export everything and take it to your own blog. You can do that following these instructions from WordPress. It’s not something I can help you with – I have to pay people to do this sort of thing for me – so don’t bother asking.

It’s a bit of the end of an era. If there were a way to keep the Reader Blogs, and even expand them to open registration again, I would. But I really don’t have the time or the budget for it.

Discussion question: Would there be interest in some form of a forum or something to keep reader-initiated discussions going? I’ve tried forums in the past on SAB, and frankly there has never seemed to be a lot of interest.