To our friends and community:

    As most of you probably know by now, Ning, who has hosted our community free of charge for the last year, has made the decision to move to a 100% paid model. When that announcement came out, Jeff and I recieved dozens of concerned tweets, emails, and messages inquiring about the welfare of our family.
    
Jeff and I immediately spoke on the phone, and we decided that, while we couldn't make any decisions until Ning's financial plans were announced, we would not let the community die off and would take necessary action to make sure things continued. We decided that whatever solution we found, it should be FREE for the members.

    This last week, Ning announced its pricing plans. The lowest plan was affordable to us and we prepared to pay for the hosting out-of-pocket, with an annual T shirt drive to help defray the costs. Unfortunately, this service tier would have only allowed us to have 150 members. We had already surpassed that number and were continuing to grow rapidly.

    The next hosting tier cost was around $200 a year, which was absolutely unacceptable to pay out-of-pocket for a site with absolutely no means of income. The community does not exist to make money, it exists as a place for discussion. As such, membership donation drives and large out-of-pocket expenses made no sense.

    This morning, Jeff mentioned how TMA was turning out to be a great counterpoint to DFTBA Records, an independent, youtube-based record label founded by Alan Lastufka and Hank Green of the VlogBrothers. DFTBA was an embodiment of all the New Model values that TMA was founded to promote - allowing artists to keep their rights, assisting them with direct-to-fan promotion and marketing, and paying artists the largest portion of the income from their record sales.

    I thought there was an interesting dynamic between the people talking about the New Model and the people actually doing it. So I spoke with Alan Lastufka, who has already made immense contributions to the New Model through youtube and his publications, and discussed some options with him. I asked him if it would be possible to use DFTBA's well-established infrastructure and network to support the TMA family. We could use their servers, for free, and we would now have a dedicated programmer to customize the forum for us. Alan thought this sounded like a great idea, and was eager to get the DFTBA community involved in the discussion as well.

Alan, Jeff and I are very excited because this move to the new server should increase traffic, membership, and widen the discussions and connections available within our community.

    Just as your thoughts and opinions played an immense role in shaping our Ning page, we urge you to share with us your input during this changeover. It is important to note that the new forums just went live today, and we didn't want to wait until everything was fully formed before asking the rest of the community to help us move in. We are still currently sorting out a lot of issues with the site layout and coding, but if we all work together, we can get up and running even faster. Several members of the community have already brought several bugs and issues to our attention, and they have all either been resolved, or are on the agenda for the next time I speak with our programmer.

    The new site is powered by software called phpBB, which is bulletin board software, and has a much more standard forum layout than Ning, which is laid out more similarly to Facebook. This bulletin board model is more centered around discussion posts than profile pages. The software is incredibly powerful, and so this should allow us to have better and deeper functionality compared to what we were used to on Ning.

    If you aren't used to this type of bulletin board, there may be a small learning curve. Most noteably, bulletin boards use BBcode instead of HTML. Don't worry, it's easier. You can find lots of information on the side, but one example: to embed a youtube video, you just need to type [youtube]videoIDhere[/youtube]. That's it.

    We know how important the live chat is to our community, so we worked with our programmer to build a brand new chat platform, from the ground up. This means it is tweakable and customizeable far more than many of the readily available pre-compiled chat platforms. It is functioning, in a very basic state currently, but we are continuing to add features and fix bugs. Immediate changes include changing the scrolling direction to top-down to match the Ning, adding a pop-out tab at the request of Travis, and widening the tab to make it easier to read. Since we coded the chat platform ourselves, these changes are easy to make and should be implemented within 48 hours.

    The Too Much Awesome Podcast will continue to be produced. You will find it in the TMA Podcast forum thread. Over the next few days we will work at getting the previous episodes transferred over, we have a brand new episode to post, and we will continue to record more shows. Although I have not yet spoken with Joe and Sammy, I have a feeling they will soon be resuming their weekly shows as well.

The new forums have not yet been announced or made public by DFTBA because we wanted to make sure our community had a chance to get set up and figure everything out first. Although that announcement should come in a few days, we encourage you to come on over now and add your account right away. The site has been live less than 24 hours at this point, and we want everyone to be using it and providing input as soon as possible.

    It is a shame that Ning has decided to kick us out (and, in my opinion, effectively put themselves out of business) and that we have to relocate, but we feel that this is the best option for our community. We promised you we wouldn't let it die and we intend to keep that promise.

    The community that has grown up around our idea has been absolutely incredible, humbling, inspiring, and awesome. Jeff and I thank you all from the bottom of our hearts for making our family so amazing, and we look forward to it growing and expanding even more in its new home.

    Please find our community at its new home, forum.dftba.com or just by typing TooMuchAwesome.org.
Any bugs, glitches, issues, or concerns can be directed to either myself or Jeff via private message, or via email to mike@mikelombardomusic.com or jeff@jeffmacdougall.com. If you contact either Jeff or myself, we will make sure we both have a chance to review your comments and respond to you.
   
As always, thank you guys for your support, and don't forget to be awesome.
    Sincerely,
Mike and Jeff
TMA CoFounders