What are we doing?

All the info you need is coming tomorrow, but the short version is that we’re going to be giving our dear readers/commenters/haters more ways to get involved in the community as members, and we’re going to set the groundwork for a new and better commenting system. We’ll be transferring everyone’s account to a system (called Memberful) that will handle memberships as well as commenter accounts. Don’t worry, all of your brilliant comments (and all of your less brilliant ones) will be retained and transferred over and, hopefully, it should all be pretty seamless. The website will remain wide open for everyone to read; this is a car site for the people, after all. We’ll continue to use our current commenting system for a while as we test Memberful and make sure the sign-up transition works, but we hope to have the much better system up-and-running soon.

What do I need to do?

Right now? Nothing. If you’re a reader and not a commenter? Nothing. If you’re a commenter? Ideally, in a few hours, you’ll be asked to login and then you’ll be sent a new link to make all the server magic happen. The new system should keep you logged in for a while, and you won’t need to deal with passwords anymore. When you come to the site you should be prompted to sign-in to comment and you’ll get this page:

All you need to do is add your email, then you’ll get a link in your email like this:

When you click that link it’ll (hopefully) recognize that you’ve got an account and this is how we’ll tie the two together:

That should be the last time you ever have to login using the old system. From this point forward, in theory, you’ll only need a link sent to your email. If you don’t have a commenter account but decide you want one it’ll be the above, just without the last step. If you notice anything not working please email us and let us know. After that, if you can afford to, we hope you’ll sign up as a member to support the site! If every commenter became a paying member we’d have enough scratch to hire two new writers immediately. So in short:

Should I be afraid?

Of this? No. Of the world? Also no! Everything is going to turn out just fine.

Is that a picture of a Riley Elf?

Yes!

Can We Go To Jason’s Basement To See How The Transition Is Going…

Will this ultimately be incredible and, potentially, life-changing?

Absolutely. Photo credit: Wheelsage

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