Behind Thurrott.com: Changes Coming Soon

We’re going to accelerate our membership transition this year so we can also make improvements to Thurrott Tokens and site comments. Here’s a quick update about the changes we hope to implement soon.

Membership transitions

We announced new memberships and related membership changes last August. There’s a lot going on there, but we’re changing the backend payment system from the overly-complex WooCommerce system I inherited when I took over Thurrott.com to a new system built by Robert and his team. This is better for everyone: Readers get a transparent, self-service experience that actually works and Laurent and I won’t have to deal with thorny, time-consuming customer service issues.

The problem is that this transition requires those with existing accounts on the site to step through a manual process. There are a few reasons for that. Payments are indirect, meaning we don’t have access to your payment methods and can’t simply move accounts over to the new system. And we’re moving solely to Stripe, which processes credit card payments and enables the self-service experience by which you will be alerted ahead of a renewal and can change your payment method at any time.

Because we can’t just switch over anyone, we’re keeping both systems in place until the transition is complete. But now that it’s 2026, we’re going to start prompting you to transition on the site when your existing membership is due for renewal. Our goal is to completely remove WooCommerce by the end of 2026. And in doing this, we can clear out inactive user accounts and avoid auto-renewals for those who no longer wish to subscribe.

Thurrott Tokens

If you click on your user account picture in the upper-right of Thurrott.com and choose the Points History link, you will navigate to a page that displays the “Thurrott Tokens” you’ve earned. We’re setting up a system to reward readers for engagement, but we haven’t really explained this yet because we’re still working through how that will work, and some of the things we’d like to do require the new membership system.

I’ll have more to say about this later, but for now, you can earn 10 tokens by signing in to the site and 5 tokens each for viewing or favoriting an article. There’s also a leaderboard we’re not yet publicly promoting, again because we’re not fully there yet. But I figured some would find that interesting, so there you go.

Comments

We use OpenWeb for article and forum comments and it’s impossible for me to explain how much this helps me regarding managing spam comments, especially, but also toxic, problematic comments. That said, OpenWeb doesn’t mesh well with our built-in Dark mode toggle, and it sometimes has reliability issues, like the one-day problem that inspired this recent forum thread.

To me, the benefits of OpenWeb far outweigh the issues. But we can’t easily award Thurrott Tokens for commenting, and since that’s such an obvious form of engagement, that means the system today is incomplete and not accurately rewarding some of those who are the most active on the site. And so I have engaged with Robert to see what it will take to replace OpenWeb with a custom-built solution that will retain all previous comments and provide a seamless transition and a few interesting improvements while hopefully not ruining the spam/toxic comment management experience for me.

Robert is testing whether we can pull this off, but it looks good, and we’ll have more to say on this change soon as well.

Forum post editing

A reader asked about whether it would be possible to edit forum posts, as there is no way to do so after posting. This has been a long-time issue, and it’s an obvious need, but no one could remember why this wasn’t implemented. So I asked Robert about it last week. And he says that this is working now. If this isn’t working as expected, please let me know.

Thanks!

Paul