I am Andrea Shubert, Producer and Managing Editor at re/Action. I wanted to post an update talking about where we’ve been and where we are going with the site, what we’ve learned, and some changes we’ve put in place to make the site even better.

The first month has been the learning experience I thought it would be, and then some. We have had some fantastic writing appear on the site during the May “Survival” issue, and I expect that trend to continue into June’s “Change” issue and beyond. We’ve also had some growing pains, including some issues with our web hosting provider. It happens. The point of any “beta” is to put something out there, see what happens, and make the fixes to problems you couldn’t anticipate. Here is a list of changes for our site, effective today:

We’ve remove the forums and we are opening up registration for the comment section to everyone. We had envisioned the forums as being a sort of “proving ground” for people we don’t know to make themselves known in a good way, before we gave them access to post comments on the bottom of our articles. Since I have a goal of making re/Action a place where you actually want to read the comments, I thought this was a good compromise between having no comments and having a filtered system in place. It just didn’t work out that way. So, as of now, anyone can register with re/Action and anyone can submit a comment — but we will be moderating those comments and none appear without human intervention first.

We are shifting to a freelance-only model. Several people expressed an interest in using re/Action as a platform for their ideas but the way I envisioned the “staff writer” role didn’t really fit the rest the rest of what we are trying to do. re/Action, at its core, is about giving the best content a place to shine — especially content that would be unlikely to find a space elsewhere. To that end we are broadening the writer pool to include as many high-quality voices as we can gather. (And if you want to contribute to our July issue, “Belief,” please have a look right here.)

We are adding an additional beta month. Call it “Beta 2” if you like. And what a month it is — we have at least a dozen fantastic articles coming your way. And later this month we will talk about our upcoming funding round, which will probably start within the next 30 days, and the nifty items we expect to make available through that. (Including a printed version of our magazine.) We’re also changing our funding goals to aim for semi-yearly instead of yearly to give us more flexibility to change as our audience grows and shifts over the rest of the year.

Thank you so much for being a part of our public beta. Feedback welcome – post at the bottom of this article, find us on Facebook, or send us a tweet.