Booklikes issues

I don't know that many people who read this blog also followed me via Booklikes, but I figured I'd talk about it a bit here just in case. Booklikes has been having serious problems for the past year or so. If you recall, I wrote a post back in May about it possibly having been sold. This was later denied by a Booklikes employee, although no one from Booklikes ever contacted The Hundert to ask them to issue a correction about the bit that said one of the site's founders had sold it, so who knows what's really going on. What it comes down to is that the site has been working like crap, or not at all, for months. Also, neither I nor any of the other users I've spoken to have had any contact with a Booklikes employee since sometime in July 2016 - no one responds to emails, Facebook posts, Twitter comments, posts in Booklikes discussion groups, or anything else.

The site was down for me a day or two ago, and it's down for me again today. I had hoped to continue using it until at least the end of the year, so that I could finish up my yearly reading challenge, but it's looking like that might not be possible.

I'm still considering what to do. I've removed the Booklikes widget from this blog because the site is down so often now that it's basically useless. I have no plans to close my Booklikes account or delete my Booklikes blog (if I even could, what with the site being down), but I might not be updating it anymore. It's sad, because in the past few years I've been posting there more than here. I loved the community, chatted with a lot of great people, discovered lots of new books, and got hooked on loose-leaf tea.

I think I'll probably start posting on Goodreads again. I still have issues with the mindset of those in charge of the site, and I hate that at least one of the people I got to know via Booklikes is banned from GR and doesn't even have the option of going back, but it's the only book site I can think of with even halfway decent social features, and it's the best way I know of to keep in touch with the majority of the folks I got to know via Booklikes.

That said, I'm probably going to use GR differently than I used to. Back when I first got started with it, it was my personal reading catalog as well as a place to mirror my reviews. Now, however, LibraryThing has taken over that role, and I think it does a better job than GR. No one but me (with very rare exceptions) can change my data, my cover image choices, etc., and I actually get to edit my own data instead of having to make do with something that isn't quite correct. Instead of being my primary catalog, GR is just going to be a place where I can interact with other readers. That means it doesn't matter if my data isn't quite right or if I haven't posted everything I've reviewed over there. I doubt I'll be importing all the reviews I've written in the past three or so years, for example.

So, that's basically it. Even if Booklikes magically comes back online by tomorrow, I'm to the point where I don't trust that it will still be there the day after that.