As you may have heard, Google announced last year that its social network Google+, which we have called our primary home since the WSH Crew was formed back on June 26, 2014, will be closed in 2019. The original plans called for the so-called Sunsetting in August 2019, but on February 1, Google informed all Google+ users that all Google+ accounts and pages would be shut down on April 2, 2019, and all content would start to be deleted at that time.
Fortunately, the WSH Crew has already been slowly migrating towards Slack as our primary means of staying in contact, so we would like to invite all community members on Google+ that haven’t already joined into our Slack. Please write an email to slack@wshcrew.space to receive an invitation with all further details. We will still vet each applicant to avoid spammers and trolls, and for this reason we would like to ask everyone to include the Google+ profile you had joined the community with, OR your Youtube or Twitch handle in your request – but all friends of the WSH Crew, viewers on Twitch and YouTube and soon to be former Google+ Community members are welcome!
The reason we are asking for everyone to join the Slack is that so we can start the migration to our own self-hosted forum that will be the replacement for the Google+ Community. In late November, we made the executive decision that we would be migrating the WSH Crew G+ Community to a self-hosted forum – an option that would provide us with an ad-free, secure environment over which we would have complete control. We have been testing the forum software since mid-January even before the announcement of the new Google+ closure date came on February 1, so the forum is already in very good shape. We are currently still in a testing period during which members of our Slack community are invited into the forum to run it through its paces, with our target date for public opening being no later than March 1, 2019.
Please everyone join us in our two new dual homes, the Slack and the Forum!
If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us via Email or on our Slack!