Over the past six months, as you probably know by now, we have been working hard to move No Depression off the Ning platform and into our own arena. In the process, we’ve added some exciting bells and whistles (a better mobile experience, commissioned feature stories, artist contributions, a new releases listing – read more about those updates).
Now, at last, we are excited to report that the new NoDepression.com is ready to launch tonight (Thursday) at midnight Pacific time! When you arrive here on Friday morning, you will see the new ND waiting for you.
Before we press “play” on the new design, however, to ensure we can make this transition as smooth as possible, we wanted to make you aware of some specific technical tweaks. Below, you will find details about changing your password — which will be necessary for all members — as well as important information about content you’ve added to the existing site. Read further for details about music, groups, and the messaging system. In case you run into any technical issues on the new site, there will be a help button for you to easily report issues.
Change Your Password: We have migrated everyone’s account onto the new site. However, you will need to create a new password in order to log into ND to post, comment, or participate in the community. When you arrive for the first time, click on “Log In” in the upper right corner, and then click on “Request New Password.” Follow the prompts to reset your password. Unless you forget your new password, you should only need to do this once. If you have any trouble at all accessing your account, please contact help@nodepression.com.
Videos: To ensure that whatever you’ve posted makes it onto the new server, please refrain from posting anything to this site on Thursday, Aug. 7. We cannot guarantee that everything posted on Thursday will make it to the new site intact. Likewise, we have discovered in early iterations of this migration that only videos posted from YouTube seem to be successfully moving over. Videos directly uploaded to Ning or posted from other servers seem to get broken in the trip to the new server. While the new site will support both YouTube and Vimeo, we apologize for any loss of content that might occur in this part of the migration. Like oranges on a truck, some are bound to fly out in transit.
Your Posts: Again, please try not to make any posts on the site tomorrow (Thursday, Aug. 7). All posts you have made on the Ning site until today should be on the new site when it launches tomorrow night. But, there may be some that slip through the cracks, considering we’re moving tens of thousands of posts from five years of content. The good news is, when you show up to the new ND, adding a post should be much more intuitive. HTML editing, however, will not be available. With the new rich text editor, you shouldn’t need to edit the HTML anyway. If you ever notice anything weird happening with the layout of your post, please let us know and our developers will tackle the coding as needed.
Music: Ning does not allow us any easy way to take with us the music you’ve uploaded to your member page. Because of legal and other issues around music sharing, we have decided not to allow music file uploads on the new site. You will, however, be able to include music in your posts by embedding videos from YouTube or Vimeo, or embedding SoundCloud players.
Groups: Groups will be temporarily disabled while we finish developing the best possible user experience for them. What we would like to see happen with them is not realistic during phase one of this redesign. Stay tuned, though. We have exciting plans for groups on ND, and they will be coming soon.
Messaging: You will no longer have an inbox on the No Depression site. Instead, folks wishing to contact you will click on a “Contact” button on your member page and the email they create will go directly to your regular email address. If you don’t want to be contacted, you will find information in the FAQ about how to disable the personal contact button.
That’s it! If you experience any technical issues with the new ND, please email help@nodepression.com and we will respond as quickly as possible. As you might imagine, this has been a big project, and we’re very excited to share the fruits of our labor. We hope you enjoy the new ND! We’ll see you there (rather, right here) on Friday.
— Chris and the ND Team
