Welcome to Brownstoner 3.0

Welcome to the new Brownstoner! The first stand-alone version of Brownstoner was built on Movable Type back in January 2005 (after an initial three-month run on Blogspot in late 2004); in 2007, the second version, the foundation of which survived until today, was designed by Apperceptive (later Six Apart). Now, we present you with the new WordPress site created (and highly-customized) by BlankSlate.

While the blog form and content remains largely the same, a lot has changed with this new site. For starters, we’ve added more focus on neighborhoods. Neighborhoods can now be found at brownstoner.com/dumbo, brownstoner.com/clinton-hill and so on. We’ve also got a new commenting system–Disqus–that we’re introducing.

IMPORTANT: YOU NEED TO REGISTER A USERNAME ON THE NEW SITE!

The Forum has been completely revamped. The world has really changed since we first introduced the Forum…Now, you can ask questions, broadcast your question to other Brownstoner members as well as to people in your social networks. Answers can be submitted and voted on by others, and the most productive members of the community can be rewarded for their valuable feedback. You can still access the old Forum thru the “Forum Archive” link.

Renovation blogs should be easier to find and navigate. (We’ve also got a couple of new ones that will be launching in the coming weeks and are looking for more!) And the Listings and Directory sections of the site have been redesigned to be easier to use and nicer to look at. Soon, we’ll be adding more features to the Listings section, like the ability to save, track and share listings. And, yes, the Restaurants section is gone. It was very expensive to produce and, as far as we could tell, most readers didn’t even know it was there.

We’ve updated the Terms of Use, Privacy Policy and added Community Standards, which we urge you to familiarize yourself with. The goal is to have a site where we can publish lots of good content, community members can participate comfortably with us and each other, useful information rises to the top, advertisers can get messages to and attract customers, and where all interactions remain respectful and falsehoods and defamatory statements are avoided.

We’ve done our best to weed out all the bugs but there will inevitably be some things that pop up in the coming days and weeks, so please feel free to contact us at feedback@brownstoner.com.

Mr. B