Today is our first semi-official day on our new independent platform. On Friday night, we published our final articles at the old site. Over the weekend, we'll only be publishing new articles on PNWSoccerMedia.com and at some point on Monday – assuming all goes to plan – we should be publishing from our new platform to SounderatHeart.com. (If this is the first you're reading about this, I'll point you to this FAQ we wrote earlier in the week.)
Most notably, that means the rest of our Sounders-Atlanta United coverage will be taking place here at our temporary site. Yes, that includes the gamethread, which will actually be a good stress test for our new commenting system. Although it doesn't have all the bells and whistles of our old configuration – yet anyway – our expectation is that it should perform basically how the old one did. Fingers crossed!
If you're receiving this email, that means you've already created a Ghost profile and started the process of signing up for newsletters. What the vast majority of you still don't have, though, is a new ID for our commenting platform, which will be different from the one you used to use to comment on stories and can still use on other SB Nation sites. You won't need that to read stories or receive emails, but you will need that in order to comment. There's no huge rush on doing that, but the easiest way to create one is to just visit the comment section on any story and try to comment. It will walk you through the steps, you can use existing Google or Facebook IDs or just create one off an email address.
I will also add that we're still working on a few things there. The biggest is that we will be adding comment counts to the front page. I don't know all that goes into being able to fully sort read and unread comments, but that's also a feature we're hoping to bring back.
Speaking of accessing stories, this weekend is your last chance to take advantage of our founding members’ pricing. For now, you can buy into the Supporter membership tier for $50 for the first year and you can become an Advocate for $150/year, with the latter offer good for as long as you keep your membership active. There are also $19/year and $500/year memberships, but those prices aren’t changing. You can read about all four membership tiers here.
While all paid subscribers will have access to all our stories and podcasts, the two main perks of higher levels of support are in connect to merchandise discounts and access to our Discord server. If you're already a Supporter or Advocate and don't know what I'm talking about, please email me.
If you already had a free or paid membership, you'll probably run into some problems trying to redeem those coupons. If you just shoot me an email after you’ve agreed to pay the full price, I can manually apply the discount. I'm happy to extend that offer to anyone until Monday when that discount ends.
In the meantime, it’s been an absolute pleasure working for SB Nation/Vox Media over the last nine years. I’m super grateful that they’ve accommodated my request to make this move and I am blown away at how many of you have expressed your support. As I write this, we have more than 700 paid subscribers signed up already, which puts us on a very promising path toward sustainability.
With your help, I truly believe Sounder at Heart can be a beacon of hope for anyone who has become frustrated with the state of soccer media. We are purposefully avoiding investors or traditional ads because we think that serves our best interests as well as those of our community. If this works, we’d love to help other sites try something similar. Thank you for playing your part and remember, You’ll Never Yacht Alone.
