Thursday, March 12, 2015

Open Salon is closing and previous posts will now be transfered here.

I have been cross posting on both Blogspot and Open Salon for two and a half years. Over two years of posts from Open Salon before I opened my account at Blogspot will now be added relatively quickly to the Blogspot account.

This closing is almost without notice. They have been having problems since I opened up the Blogspot account but started running smoothly months later when they shut down all new accounts. This means that they've been "Open" in name only since then. New blogs and ability to comment has been shut down without warning; and they are going to take all of it down in two weeks; so if they're not transferred by then or saved on another account they will be lost. Copies have been kept and a notice to find the new ones that will inevitably be buried under the old ones will me made when the reposts are complete.

The following is a copy of the notice they sent in an E-mail:

News about Open Salon 03/10/2015

Thank you so much for being a part of Open Salon for the past 6 years. We have appreciated every personal story, every joke, every anecdote and every conversation within the community. However, due to the changing landscape of blogging, we have made the difficult decision to close this site. Starting today you will no longer be able to log into and, consequently, to upload, update or edit information within your Open Salon account. For the next 14 days you will still be able to view your profile page and all the content stored therein. Please refer to our attached FAQs for more information pertaining to Open Salon and the closing of services.

We remain dedicated to facilitating discussion around the issues and events you care about on Salon.com, and to deliver thought provoking, passionate, content.

Thank you again for being a part of our journey.

Regards,
Open Salon Staff

Here are the answers to some questions you might have right now:

Why can't I log in to Open Salon?


As of March 10, 2015, Open Salon will be closing its doors so that we can focus on the growing and active community at salon.com. After this date, logging in won't be possible.



How can I access my blog?


After March 10, 2015, you'll still be able to view your posts at your profile url for no less than 14 days, but you will not be able to access them for editing on Open Salon. Please be advised that your profile and all content will be taken down from public view and cease to exist by March 24, 2015. Please make alternative arrangements for copying and storing your Open Salon content, as it won’t be available after the aforementioned date.



I'm having trouble accessing my profile page.


Email openstaff@salon.com for help, and please realize that we may only respond to inquiries that we can be of assistance to.



What will happen to my account?


All Open Salon accounts will be locked and inaccessible post-March 10, 2015. After then, no log in will be possible. To be a part of the community at salon.com, you'll need to register there, if you haven’t already. [Please note: for quite some time, Open Salon registration automatically created a matching Salon account. Please feel free to use your credentials to log in to Salon, or reach out to openstaff@salon.com for assistance, if that does not work. You should also refer to Salon's Privacy Policy (salon.com/about/policy), as it is unrelated to Open Salon's Privacy Policy.]


What about my Google AdSense account?

While your content is visible at open.salon.com, your ad revenue will continue to accumulate as usual. However, after March 24, 2015, when the content is eventually removed from public view and access, there will no longer be any ads present. You can manage and disable your account directly through AdSense.

What about the posts that are in draft status, and are therefore available for me to copy from the site?

On a limited basis, we will be able to assist in retrieving this content from our database. You will need to send the request to openstaff@salon.com from the email address that is associated with your Open Salon account. We will be processing requests in batches, in the order received, and will deliver the content to you as soon as we can. limited post that they provided publicly.


The claim that they're trying to "focus on the growing and active community at salon.com" and implication that they want people from Open Salon to join it if they haven't already is suspect considering the way they shut it down. When they had problems off and on for years they claimed they were trying to repair them and blamed some of them on spam. No other site that I have ever seen did such a bad job handling spam which never made any sense to begin with. When the spam was saturating the site it didn't make sense for the spammers since it couldn't advertise anything when it was ruining their own source.

Regardless of why that happened they could have given more notice; Geocities gave at least six to eight months notice when they shut down and they did what they said prior to that.

For now I will continue to post at Blogspot; regularly timed posts will resume after all the posts that I intend to transfer are reposted.

If I start cossposting elsewhere at some time in the future I'll announce it here then.




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