The good news is, a better version of the No Film School website is coming soon. The bad news is, the comments won’t make it. Here’s how to save yours.
TL;DR: go to your profile page and click “Comment History.”
A brief walk down memory lane
The current version of the No Film School website, launched all the way back in 2014, is definitely showing its age. What I originally started as a blog in 2010 with no byline (because I wrote every article myself and “by me” seemed redundant) had grown to a multi-author site with millions of pageviews. For the relaunch in 2014, I wanted to turn NFS into a full-blown community site, which would hopefully give rise to active, helpful discussions among filmmakers.
It didn’t work.
Our forums were inundated by spam almost immediately, and we lacked a number of features that would’ve been crucial for the community to thrive (notifications, messaging, moderation tools, etc). Despite our lofty ambitions, the site continued largely as before — as a blog, not a forum.
We continued making improvements over the years, like launching our podcast, and redesigning the article page — but for the most part, developing new features on a Drupal-based website was slow and costly, and I soon regretted moving off of WordPress.
Our new, faster, better website is almost here—currently scheduled to launch July 17. We’ve been working on it for the past several months. More on that soon!
In the meantime, when we finally bid the old site adieu, we will unfortunately also need to say goodbye to the comment history on this site. The new CMS (Content Management System) won’t play nicely with our past comments, so we’ll be starting from a clean slate as far as comments are concerned.
But fret not! If you’ve made valuable contributions to our articles over the years, we’ve built a tool for you to access and download your commentary so you don’t lose it.
How to download your comments
It’s easy. Just login to the site, click on your profile pic at top right, then on your own profile page, under DOWNLOADS on the left, you’ll see a link labeled “Comment History:”
Click that, and voilà. The entire history of you (at least as far as your comments on NFS are concerned) will be downloaded as an html file, complete with links to the original stories for context.
We wish we could bring everything over to the new site, but since that unfortunately isn’t feasible, this is the best we could do. If you’ve commented here over the years, we greatly appreciate your voice, and we hope you join us on the new site, coming soon!
If you have any issues accessing your comment history, let us know… in the comments!
