Last week, I woke up oblivious to what was about to happen. I got out of bed, went through the usual morning routine, and while having some toast, I casually opened my smartphone’ browser to check the morning news and catch up on Disqus responses — and there it was!
Disqus was going to divorce from the channel system and told us we had to move out and look for a place of our own. While some us of all knew for some time that mom and dad were steering towards that divorce, you are never quite prepared for it. After the the initial minute stage of denial, anger and disbelief, survival instincts kicked in and I started to do what I generally do, look for solutions.
One hour later, our new, but minimally decorated and empty home, was pulled out of the ground. It didn’t take long for Ms. G to start putting up new discussions and many of you followed to our new residence, where it didn’t take long for the first volunteers to help decorate. It was our own Sumarious that graciously offered to redecorate our new site in the style of our all too familiar News Views and he did an awesome job! Thank you, Sumarious. We greatly appreciate all you have done.
Five days in, we have further styled our new home and added a lot of new content and we will keep on working on adding more.
What energized me most, however, is how quickly all of you adapted to our new home! — and extremely flattering, which is hard to say for a guy that really hates to take a compliment. I will always maintain that this has been and will always be a community effort. Building a site is easy, building an awesome community however is the real hard work.
In regards on how things worked on the “old” News Views channel, you may have noticed already that some things have changed because of the nature of the new site. Community members cannot post new articles at this time. It will take some time and custom programming for this to happen. However, feel free to contact us with any topics, news, articles, etc.. that you would like to see. We will do our best to post them.
We have also created many new categories and have branched out into some new categories we had not explored on the original News Views. We believe there will be something for everyone to enjoy.
You may have also noticed we have placed a few banners on the site that point to various grassroots type organizations; none of these are being monetized. We believe they champion great causes and aren’t intrusive to your overall site experience. However we will eventually have to explore monetizing Disqus ad revenue to offset costs of running and maintaining our server if we continue to grow and when Disqus determines we qualify for their Reveal ad-revenue programme.
Other exciting new features we have added are podcasts and a scrolling live video feed along side your comments, so you can chat while you watch the live stream simultaneously — and yes, this feature works on smartphones and tablets as well.
To keep following the new News Views site on your Disqus home feed, go to https://disqus.com/home/forum/newsviewsonline/ and click the Follow button and voilà you are all set!
To wrap up, what this divorce has taught me most of all, is that while changes may be difficult at start, awesome things can happen when you embrace them. Being evicted isn’t so bad after all then.
Again, I want to thank everyone that has been doing a tremendous job so far, Ms G. for fostering an awesome community, a team of fantastic moderators, and most of all you for embracing your new home. You rock!
