I know there's been a lot of conversation here over the last week about the fate of the Reader Blogs section of TPMCafe. I've been touch and heartened by all the things people have said, most particularly how much many of you value the community that exists here. I've given this a lot of thought over the last week. And more importantly we've discussed the technical options open to us. The key, as I've said before, is that for several different overlapping reasons we cannot continue to run this version of the Reader Blogs. Mostly it's about cost. But it's a little more complicated than that because related to the cost issue is that the Reader Blogs section of TPMCafe is keeping us anchored in the 'community' installation of Movable Type. The makers of Movable Type are moving away from supporting MT for sites that operate at our scale, especially for ones that use the community features we do.

What all of that amounts to is that the current system doesn't work well and is getting worse; it's keeping us anchored in what is an increasingly obsolete technology that we can no longer build on; and it's keeping us paying far more than we should be paying for monthly hosting expenses. So a) the rest of the site cannot easily be upgraded without doing away with the current Reader Blogs set up. And, to give you broad take, by making their changes to our servers and publishing platform that would require us to eliminate Reader Blogs we TPM can at least halve its monthly server costs and quite likely get them down by 75% or even more. That's for eliminating a part of the site that accounts for less than 1% of the site's audience.

In the discussions over the last week many have ask whether or simply asserted that I don't care about, don't value or don't sufficiently value this forum. I don't agree with that. But let me provide the necessary context for the question. Let's say you ran the Reader Blogs section of TPMCafe. And you valued it greatly. But ... but you paid out of pocket $60k or $70k a year, give or take, to keep it running. I'm sure many of you can imagine that one could value something greatly and still just not be able to spend that money out of pocket to keep the thing going. I don't ask you to agree or not but to understand the financial realities surrounding the decision.

So, this has led us to try to think of some way that we can maintain the Reader Blogs area of TPMCafe at a dramatically different costs structure, can get it to run smoothly and doesn't prevent us from upgrading the rest of the site.

First, the bad news. We are going to shut down this version of the Reader Blogs section. And we plan on doing it at the end of next week. To be clear, that doesn't mean they'll vanish. They'll remain visible. And, as I'll discuss later, we've made plans to allow you to easily extract your posts if you want to take them elsewhere. What will change is that you'll no longer be able to add new posts.

However, as part of our sleuthing around, I believe we've found a way to bring the Reader Blogs back. Using the hosting infrastructure behind Typepad, which is a service of the same parent company that creates MT, we think we can bring it back and have a version of TPMCafe that basically has everything it has right now but without all the problems and excessive expense.

But here's the catch. We cannot have that up and running by next week. In fact we still need to investigate how feasible it is. So what we're talking about is the service shutting down, remaining shut down for some period of time, probably at least a few weeks, perhaps more, and then returning in a different form. (To give you yet more background: there are basically two issues. Bringing back Reader Blogs using the Typepad server architecture and having them here at TPMCafe -- and doing all that PLUS migrating all your old posts into the new system. The first part of the equation is probably pretty straightforward. We *think* the second part may be doable. But it'll hard and more complicated.)

To be clear on what this would be. Everyone would have a blog who has one now; new people could get them; the blog would live here at TPM. The only real difference would be one you really wouldn't see and that is that we'd be able to outsource the server administration of those blogs.

Now the thought has occurred to me: if we shut Reader Blogs down for like a month, will anybody be here or come back when we restart it? That's not really clear to me. Not clear to me at all. And if no one's going to be here, there's really no point in bringing it back. Second, I cannot provide a date certain when it will come back. What we would do is shut the current set up down and assure you that we plan to bring it back once we have the means to do so -- in all likelihood using Typepad, as I noted above.

On this point, I need your input. I'd be curious to see how many people think they'd continue using the Reader Blogs after that kind of intermission.

So that's where we stand. The current set up WILL SHUT DOWN next Friday. You don't have to scramble to download your stuff. It won't go anywhere. You just won't be able to post new stuff. The question is whether we try to resurrect it in a new form and whether it is worth doing so, whether anyone will be around to use it, given that there will be at least a period of a few weeks when there won't be anything.

We'll gauge response based feedback and discussions with readers and then make a decision.