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The decision has been made to stop publishing new posts on Offbeat Families, effective September 2013. If your initial reaction is one of mixed anger/grief/confusion, HI! Welcome to the Offbeat Families is Closed support group. We’ll be guiding you through this journey. Before we dig in, you might want to make sure you’re wearing your favorite fuzzy socks and have a nice, warm cup of coffee nearby (maybe with something extra to “accidentally” knock in, amIright?!).
Many endings are also beginnings, and this situation is no different. It might make you feel better to know that Offbeat Families posts and community won’t disappear… but maybe it’s time we just dig in:
So here’s what you really need to know
Nothing is being deleted
The site will be archived in perpetuity. So all of those great posts that you love? The great comments on those posts? They’ll all still be there. You can still reference and share them. You can send them to friends, go back and reaffirm your feelings on a topic, or just search on the site to see if we’ve covered something. But…
Comments are closed
While the posts and comments will remain online, all comments on all posts are closed — without a dedicated editor around to moderate comments, it’s not feasible to leave them open. The silver lining: all of the original comments will be locked in place, so you’ll still get the benefit of thousands of opinions, thoughts, and experiences.
We’ll stick around on Facebook!
Offbeat Families posts will be shared on Offbeat Home & Life’s Facebook page. Each day, we’ll be sharing the most popular posts from our massive archive, as well as linking to new family-related posts — because there will still be new family posts, which leads to the next point…
The Offbeat Empire WILL still publish stories about families
Our sister site Offbeat Home & Life will be publishing weekly-ish family-related posts. These won’t look like what you’re used to — we won’t be running new posts on extended breastfeeding or birth stories, for example — but there will be some GOOD stuff on there. The posts we run on Offbeat Home & Life will be a little more accessible, a little broader in scope, and really, really great.
So, there you go, friends. If you’d like more of the business perspective on Offbeat Families ceasing publication, head over to the Offbeat Empire business blog.
