It’s kind of unbelievable that we are almost a week away from leaving the VoxMedia/SBNation network that has been the only home for Raw Charge since its inception. The good news is that Raw Charge will stay Raw Charge. Just before beginning this post we signed off on the agreement to transfer the domain name from VoxMedia to us effective on April 1st. At that point we will officially be an independent website.
There will likely be a bit of a delay as the archives are transferred over and all of the background action takes place. So that means www.rawcharge.com might be stagnant for a day or two. Of course, the Tampa Bay Lightning play on April 1st and since we don’t want to interrupt our coverage while a history major (that’s me!) figures out technical things, I would suggest bookmarking our temporary site – https://raw-charge.ghost.io
That site will be flipped on at some point on March 31st and should be live for a couple of days until we finish the transfer of www.rawcharge.com.
Some notes about the transfer. While we will be getting the all of the previous published content from the archives, some things will not be transferred:
- Photos – it’s a licensing thing
- Comments – different commenting platforms
- FanPosts/FanShots – SBN community regulations
- User Names and log-ins – due to privacy agreements between users and VoxMedia
So yes, you will have to create a new user name and password in order to comment at the new website. Speaking of comments. The default commenting platform at Ghost does not auto-refresh. That will be wildly annoying for Game Threads, yes. We will have to muddle through that during the first few weeks. At this point our funding doesn’t allow for integration of a more robust commenting system, however, that is something we may look at in the future.
Accounts are free to sign up and you will be able to comment with the basic tier. We will also be offering an upgraded tier for $4 a month/ $40 per year that will include additional content and perks. During this initial launch of the website we don’t want to bog down the website with a ton of advertisements, however, that could be an option moving forward. We are also soliciting sponsorship opportunities to help offset the cost of running the site. There will also be a tip jar available for those that want to throw us a couple of bucks here and there.
The GoFundMe is just a few hundred dollars short of our goal, so feel free to chip in (or talk your friends into throwing a few bucks our way).
We will also be updating our logo. A process that is much more fun than I anticipated. We should have that ready to go in time for the launch. Hopefully, we’ll be adding a merchandise line along with it at some point. So, if your lifelong dream was to drink coffee out of a Raw Charge branded mug, while wearing a Raw Charge hoodie, well, you will be in luck.
There will be some cosmetic changes throughout the coming months as we tweak the new site, and you may see the occasional broken link (again, history major here) but our first focus will be on content. That’s how the community was built and that’s the best way to keep things going. Yes, there will be some obstacles and annoyances along the way, but it’s going to be a fun journey. Hopefully, by the time next season rolls around we’ll have 90% of the issues ironed out.
We appreciate everyone that has stopped by over the years (even the trolls) and look forward to keeping this thing rolling. Thank you, and GoBolts!
JustinG. and the Raw Charge Team.
