Our corporate roots go back to the days of message boards. Over the years, we've served hundreds of thousands of customers and hundreds of millions of end users. We've continuously improved our products, trying our best to provide the tools that our customers and users need to engage with each other online.

We've all seen the rise of the dominant social networks, which compete with the autonomous communities that we support. Everyone in the world knows how to use and interact on a social network, while fewer are familiar with traditional forum-based communities.

For this reason, we embarked on an ambitious plan over the past year to simplify and transform Crowdstack so that it could be more familiar to the average social network user. After all, the goals of social networks and autonomous communities are the same - to make it easy for people to engage with each other. So our thought was that we needed to make Crowdstack more "social", while trying not to sacrifice all of the tools we had developed over the years that are so helpful for community administrators. You've seen us add features like reactions and a more social content stream.

While we've made many incremental improvements in this regard over the past year, the more fundamental changes we had in mind would have required our existing customers to radically change their communities and to accept far fewer features.

Rather than force these changes on everyone, we are going to be splitting off this new concept into its own product, while maintaining the current product as "Crowdstack Pro."

Yes, Crowdstack Pro will have a baby sister soon. She's smaller, has her own personality, and may even be a little precocious, but we love them both equally.

If you are one of our existing customers, nothing will change for you, other than the new product name. We will continue to support and develop Crowdstack Pro; the new product is not a replacement, just a fundamentally different one that needs to stand on its own. The domain name you use for your Crowdstack is not changing either. Literally, this is just a product name change for you.

The new Crowdstack still has some of the back-end power tools that we have developed, but it is missing many features existing customers are accustomed to. For example, the following features are not included: Home Page, Forums, Blog, Resources, Chat, Databases, custom pages, webspace, subgroups, roles and permissions, header, footer, video uploads, signatures, member notes, custom menus, dedicated registration system, post by email, custom emoticons, member titles, and news flash.

There will be no way to convert a Crowdstack Pro site to the new Crowdstack. This Hey Stack community will continue, focused only on Crowdstack Pro, but we are moving our support ticketing system to a new service so that we can better serve all of our customers.  This will be an email-based system-- just email us at [email protected] for official support.