Hello A.V. Club commenters, lurkers, and other friends,
As you may have heard, The A.V. Club is moving to Kinja, the same web publishing platform as our new brethren at the Gizmodo Media Group. Today we can confirm that the transition will take place this Wednesday, August 23, 2017. Here are the bold-print, bullet-pointed details:
- The switch is scheduled for 10 a.m. Central, and if all goes smoothly, will be completed by 12 p.m. Our site will remain live throughout, though we won’t have that day’s new features up until after the switch, and we won’t be able to publish anything at all during those two hours. We would like to formally request that no beloved celebrities die within this window.
- Once we’re live, we’ll have a Newswire containing detailed instructions on how to claim your current A.V. Club account on Kinja. This goes for those of you with old A.V. Club accounts, those who only have Disqus accounts, and those who already have Kinja accounts. Unfortunately, the site has to be live for the process to work, so we can’t give you the instructions until then. But it will be the very first thing posted.
- As we mentioned in our recent town hall, you will have a month after the site switches to Kinja to transfer your account.
- Everyone who moves their current account over will be automatically approved—meaning your comments won’t be consigned to the “grays” of the Pending tab.
- After we’re live on Kinja, all anxieties about this transformation will dissipate, lost to the restorative ebb and flow of time.
But seriously, folks… We know from talking to you that there’s hesitation, skepticism, even some apocalyptic portent in the air. We’re working with the Kinja tech team on addressing some of your biggest concerns about the commenting system, beginning with the ability to sort comments chronologically. We also know there will be a natural period of adjustment while we deal with this kind of stuff, as we tweak the site to better fit its new surroundings, and figure out how to make everything as functional as it can possibly be. Please bear with us. It’s a big change for us as well.
That said, we’ve been working really hard to get all the final design elements of the site ready, and we’re very pleased with how it’s turning out. We’ve also been going in and ensuring that our years of archived content successfully makes the leap, article by article, comment thread by comment thread. And after working with Kinja for several weeks now, on our end, we’re all pretty excited to have a CMS that just works—quickly, reliably, and without the many delightful little quirks that we’ve had to deal with off and on for many years. It’s going to make it a lot easier to do our jobs, and we’re looking forward to doing just that, Wednesday and beyond.
In the meantime, if you have any lingering concerns that have not been addressed here or in the previous FAQ.
Thank you, as always, for being part of The A.V. Club. We’ll see you on the other side.