Sep 17, 2011

Finally, a brand-new and fully independent social network platform for Wirtland!

Finally, Wirtland is on the way to get its own platform for social network. From beginning, Witizens of Wirtland Network (W.o.W. Network) was based on Ning platform, later migrated to Grou.ps. The quality and reliability of commercial hosting providers was often insufficient. And they were becoming increasingly greedy. Ning, and later Grou.ps demanded that Wirtland upgrades to more expensive service plans, since our membership was growing every day. But Wirtland's policy is unchanged: citizenship of Wirtland will always remain free, and there will be no obligatory membership fees!

There were many discussions about necessity of creation of an independent platform for WoW Network, which finally are leading to a concrete achievement. The first independent network is now open for membership and testing at http://witi.medianewsonline.com. It's yet in beta testing stage, but its functionality is extending every day. The good thing is that it's completely free from any non-Wirtland branding or advertising.

With time, all the content will migrate from old network to the new one. But this process is not automatic, and migration of 2000 member profiles by hand is a very complicated process. Therefore, we are encouraging every witizen to register himself/herself at the new network. We are also asking to consider voluntary donations to Wirtland (of $10 or above), to help us cover the costs of migration and new network setup. This is completely voluntary, non-obligatory support. Our Donations page is here.

The new network is based on customized version of BuddyPress software. The hosting provider is Wirtland's long-time partner Agilityhoster. Comments and suggestions from users will be appreciated. Feedback from programmers, designers, and other professionals interested in helping the project is also welcome. Wirtland's old and new citizens are welcome at new site!