A Fond Farewell to Our Community Areas
Dear Catsters and Dogsters,
Today, we announce major changes to Catster.com and Dogster.com. While the Catster and Dogster sites will continue to exist as daily magazines serving the worldwide community of cat and dog lovers, it is with heavy hearts that we must announce the closing of the Community areas of the sites, effective on or after July 18, 2019. This means members of the Catster and Dogster Community will no longer be able to see Pet Profiles, Forums, Groups, Answers, Local Listings, Photo Galleries, Games, Quizzes, Adoption, Cat of the Day, Diary Central, the Gift store, and the Community homepage past that date.
This is hard news for us all. When I-5 Publishing, now Lumina Media, purchased the sites in the summer of 2014, we had hoped saving all of Catster and Dogster was possible. But as our engineers dug in and began the work necessary to rebuild the community sections of the sites, they ran into obstacle after obstacle. The pet pages and forums utilized proprietary coding, which had undergone multiple modifications by multiple engineering teams. So many of the community features had broken that as we fixed one problem, the fix would often cause another feature to break.
Twelve years is forever in the online world, and that’s how long Catster and Dogster’s community pages have been around. It is still a source of professional pride that Dogster was a precursor to Facebook by almost a month. Now as our community areas come to the end, let’s do our best to celebrate the joy that has been this community.
We invite you to stay in touch via Catster and Dogster’s social pages:
Thank you for everything,
Team Catster
