The Chainlink - Please Chime in on Our New Address

Hello! I've been pretty busy these last several weeks working on The Chainlink's improvements and I wanted to give a mini update as well as get your opinion for our future URL...

A little background about our platform...

When I acquired The Chainlink in December, 2014 I wasn't able to move forward with the project Julie had started. There are many reasons why that solution would have been a step back for us and so I had to make the difficult decision to pull the plug on the project. My next step was to try to upgrade Ning (our current platform). I quickly realized the company put a stop to upgrades and abandoned supporting and growing Ning so I looked for similar community platforms to switch to with minimum interruption. There was nothing for a very long time. And then, after a lot of research, I found our future platform with a migration path and all of the features we need including a mobile site and much faster response times. I am in the process of archiving our site and will be moving it over to the new platform, hoping to launch in the next few months. I'll move it along as fast as I can so we can enjoy the "new" Chainlink in those busy bike months.

Chainlink for everyone!
Once the new platform is up and running, I will be launching more cities. My plan is to launch 50 U.S. cities and then launch a few overseas as well. This will allow you to jump on to another city to plan a vacation, plan a move, etc. I'm very excited to bring The Chainlink to more cities and grow our Chainlink community.

thechainlink.org

This URL has caused me some grief because we are not a non-profit yet having a .org tends to be used mostly by non-profits so I need a different option, keeping our name but still easy to remember. This is where you come in - please let me know what you think about these URLs. On a side note - I have been trying (without success) to acquire thechainlink.com.

1. thechain.link

2. thechainlink.co

3. thechainlink.info

All of these domains have already been acquired and I plan to have all of them point to the site. So, what do you think? 1, 2, or 3?

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Permalink Reply by Gary Gilbert on March 23, 2016 at 3:05pm

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) most people are familiar with .com .net .gov .edu .org and not many other extensions. I suggest avoiding extensions assigned to other countries (like .co) or rarely used (like .info)

Fortunately (or perhaps unfortunately) the assignment of .com .org etc is not legislated but merely a convention. Other than some dns geeks, no one will object to continuing with .org.

Most large businesses buy all the extensions and point them to the same ip address.

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Permalink Reply by Yasmeen on May 24, 2016 at 3:33am

We've continued to have outages and technical difficulties with Ning so I've been focusing on the migration. The new site is installed and right now I have the unfortunate task of downloading the current site. Woof. Due to a technical glitch, I had to start the process all over again but hopefully this time will stick and I'm nearly done so I wanted share a little update about the new site as well as a few things to expect:

1. 99% of the content and pics are successfully downloading to upload to the new site. There may be a few pics and posts missing. I'm doing everything I can to minimize that from happening but there are a few files that are being stubborn.

2. Friendships - we'll need to refriend people once on the new site. Unfortunately, Ning doesn't allow those relationships to be archived so they can't be transferred to the new site. It's probably a good time to write down those friendships and keep them handy so you can refriend people when the new site launches.

3. Passwords - everyone will need to reset their passwords. It's a hassle but on a good note, it's fairly easy to do and completely worth it to be off of Ning.

4. New platform/site awesomeness - Can't wait for us to experience faster downloads, new technology, faster server response times, and a shiny new platform. This will allow us to go next level and I am very excited to share it with all of you once it's live. We are moving to a next generation community site so we'll still have all of the great functionality of a community with more. I realize sometimes it's hard to make changes but the main concern I have is that over the last few months, Ning seems to be experiencing more and more issues - outages, technical errors, etc. This will be a great change for us and allow me to expand to new cities - great for all of us when it's time to go on vacation, explore by bike, etc.

5. New mobile site, functionality includes a separation of classifieds (marketplace) from the normal forum. This answers the feedback we received that people would prefer the two to be separate. More social functionality (similar to FB) and more stability.