It is just over three weeks to the end of March, so I thought I should update you on the progress of site migration, and also share some not so wonderful news.

Bad news first:

There is no way to keep the comments on existing posts when the posts themselves are exported. This is not what anyone wants to hear, but it is the reality. The comments pre 2021 are gone regardless, but the new comments will also disappear.

This isn’t a choice being made, so much as a reality of the difficulty of maintaining user privacy. Even if it were possible to reacquire the text, no one would be able to claim them for their own words. Your account at SBN will not be exported, since no user data is being transferred.

You will have to make a new account at the new site once it has changed over.

Other news:

The process of refining the site design is ongoing, and after some timely help from a very kind commenter here, I was able to fill in the gaps in my knowledge to get it all working. I am focusing first on adding a few simple features that the site theme didn’t have, but I will tweak the look of things as well.

In something I’d like to take credit for but was a total fluke, my bank happened to offer a big bonus interest for the next few months, so the GoFundMe money is now earning better than GIC interest, and a bank is sponsoring PPP whether they know it or not!

There is not going to be a seamless transition, just due to the realities of the internet and how long it takes to propagate a DNS change. We have a plan for this and will make sure you will know where to go and what to do ahead of time.

As we get closer to the end of March, I will likely do some other survey to ask you all about preferences — one example we talked about was the newsletter via email idea, which I don’t like, but if some people want it, it’s not terribly difficult to do for those who are interested.

RSS feeds are automatic, and we can customize them as well if there is demand for something specific.

I have been striving for a privacy-focused site, so to the end, I did not pick the Disqus commenting plugin, even though it’s likely the most fully featured. I went with a paid-only service that never has ads on it. It’s also much lighter weight, because the second thing I want is performance.

That’s about all to be mentioned now other than assurance to you it’s underway and I do feel like I’m halfway up the mountain.