UPDATED: SOFREP Subscription Model: The Action Plan

Team Room, we’re moving SOFREP to a subscription model this Friday night, so I want to give you an update and let you know what to expect during the transition.

THURSDAY

The shit is going CRAZY tonight, so we’re keeping Team Room open until the last possible moment before we need to lock up for the integration with SOFREP.com. SOFREP Dev and I are moving forward and think we’ll lock it up during the day on Friday.

On Thursday night, sometime after 6pm Pacific, we’ll make Team Room read-only. This means there will be no commenting or updates to the Forums. Shoutbox will be live and you’ll have access to read all the content, watch SOFREP TV videos and listen to SOFREP Radio shows, you just won’t be able to comment. This will allow us to export all the Team Room content and forums to the staging website.

FRIDAY

On Friday night, y’all can take the night off. Get pizza with the family, go to the range, watch Oceans 11 again, anything you want. Because beginning at 4pm Pacific time, SOFREP.com will also go read-only, and sometime before 9pm Pacific we’ll post a Maintenance page and take SOFREP.com and Team Room offline. We’ll export recent SOFREP content and comments, and do a final synchronization of content and comments to the staging site and do all that developer magic that SOFREP Dev is so good at.

Then we copy the staging site to the live servers and voila, we’re back in business early Saturday morning.

Saturday

When you come to SOFREP on Saturday morning you’ll find Team Room integrated within SOFREP.com. You won’t go to a separate URL anymore. You’ll use a secure login form and then you’ll browse SOFREP and Team Room as one website.

Commenting will not be integrated with your logins – we will still use LiveFyre – so that experience will remain the same for this initial transition.

You will have access to the complete SOFREP TV and SOFREP Radio archives with your Team Room comments. There won’t be any more duplication of these channels.

What Should You Expect From This Change?

This subscription thing is an evolution for SOFREP.com. We’re looking for ways to continue to work with our great sponsors, while also remaining free of their editorial oversight (‘cuz not every sponsor wants to be listed on ‘Been Around the World Twice‘). The subscription requirement will reduce the number of visitors and commenters on our website at first, but we hope it boosts the quality of commenting. And we’re pretty sure our sponsors will recognize that our content is compelling.

For Team Room, we are asking our writers to each provide you with two posts per month, as well as to hang out and contribute to Forums and Shoutbox. Being that we’re combining the websites, we think this makes a lot more sense and should be fun and easy for the authors. I’m asking the writers to give depth and insights about their posts – extra details, talk about the behind the scenes, or write about their military and SOF experiences – anything unique and beyond what they publish on the main site. You should see a lot more activity from them.

You folks deserve something extra for your support and we aim to deliver that to you.

You should also expect a better billing experience. We’re adding regular credit card processing so you can move to that if you don’t want to go through PayPal. And we’re providing options for upgrading and downgrading accounts, so when funds are tight maybe you’ll choose to downgrade rather than exfil completely.

Mobile – we’re getting rid of the new ‘responsive’ mobile experience and going back to an improved version of the mobile design we used before. Our mobile stuff is too damn slow now and the updated mobile is screaming fast. I think you’ll like it and I can’t wait to get it into your hands.

So for now that’s it. I may post another update tomorrow night, and you should also look for a newsletter update just to keep you informed.

Thanks as always for your time and contributions to SOFREP. Brandon, Jack and I really appreciate it – your time means a lot to us!

– Charlie

UPDATE: And by the way, new Team Room members will be paying 12.99. Y’all pay $9.99/mo and we won’t raise that for 3 years. THREE years. So that’s pretty good, right?

UPDATE 2: Brandon has taken to calling Team Room the SOFREP Underground, so there may be some re-branding going on at some point. Team Room… Underground… Mafia… SOFREP.

(Featured Image: USMC!)