With a third of the month to go, I’m finalizing the details of moving to new hosting. Thanks to your support for the GoFundMe so far, right now it looks like we should have just enough to cover the expenses of going independent (setting up a LLC, obtaining media insurance and web hosting, buying the domain name) while also continuing to pay staff members for a few months.
Our colleagues at The Ice Garden were able to get their new site up almost immediately. On the Forecheck has years more coverage to import, but we should hopefully be able to switch from this OTF to the new OTF seamlessly, with your bookmarks or shortcuts still working just fine. There may be a few hours of downtime heading from March 31 to April 1, but I hope not, and I’ll provide further updates as we get closer to that date.
We’re continuing to look at your responses to the community survey, and it seems like some definite trends have emerged. The demographic data we asked for will help us to reach out to advertisers and sponsors to help pay our staff and the site maintenance costs. We’ll also be setting up a site Patreon account, allowing our community to support OTF directly.
As I continue to work on the move, and we continue to hear from you, I’ll have more to share in return.