Summary: We’re blogging more often (what would you like us to cover?) and removed Disqus for on-site comments (you’ll now have an account directly with TP).
Since launching, The Prepared has focused on deep, detailed articles around topics like gear reviews, survival skills, beginner checklists, and emergency scenario guides. We spend time testing products, interviewing experts, and thinking through all of the complex facets of emergency preparedness so you can get trustworthy and practical answers as easily as possible.
Truth be told, we do all this first and foremost for ourselves and our loved ones — we invest fully in our own recommendations, and we build our family emergency plans around everything you see on this site. That’s how TP was born: we were doing this work anyway, started sharing it with other people, and it grew.
Our goal until now was to get out the foundational content a typical person would need to get their basics in order. We’re just about there.
So we’ve been talking with fans to explore what kind of new things The Prepared could offer on top of our deep guides (which we will continue to do). You’ve shared a lot of great ideas and we’ve been working on them behind the scenes.
Today marks the first steps in some of these new experiments, and we’re inviting you along for the ride.
Blogging
Our in-depth articles take weeks to prepare, which means we can only do a few per month with our small team. In contrast, this blog is meant for informal ideas or interesting stories we run across that deserve to be shared but don’t need a whole, permanent guide.
So we’re investing in sharing a few blog posts per week. Recent examples:
- How to handle the CA blackouts at the last minute for under $100
- Aporkalypse Now: Snipers, drones, and a nasty disease
- Gear finds 10-28-2019: Advanced Materials Edition
- Resources for the 2019 California power outages
- First impressions: Helle Knives Utvaer
- Interview with Portland water officials about their recent earthquake study
- Resources for thinking about an American Civil War 2
We’re not sure yet what kinds of posts and topics we’ll cover — it’s for you, after all, so tell us what you’d like to see and give feedback along the way!
We’ll never become a fear monger or political blog, but do you want to see news on current events related to preparedness? One-off gear reviews? Stories from the community? What else?
On-site community
We participate in many social groups on places like Facebook and Reddit. But those aren’t always the best mediums to have meaningful conversations — and as you know, most of them are riddled with junk, extremists, and conspiracy theories.
And in recent years, platforms like Facebook and YouTube have become hostile to anything that even touches topics like knives, hunting, firearms, and other legit preparedness topics. For example, Facebook recently banned a post from TP because we had a picture of a knife in a “non-kitchen context.” (it was in the woods for fieldcraft!)
Many of you have also asked for a forum and other ways to contribute your knowledge to the community.
Today we took the first step and removed Disqus, an outside plugin that had powered our on-article comments, and replaced it with our own system. On-article comments are the first place you’ll see this change. You’ll now have an account directly with The Prepared and we won’t have to worry about third-party censorship or privacy concerns.
We’ve also updated our privacy and community policies to reflect these changes. In short, The Prepared will continue to be a place for civil people to talk about preparedness, without politics or other noise, and will take a heavy hand in moderating.
We’ve been quietly working on some cool new features and will continue releasing new account/profile upgrades over the next weeks/months.
Would you like a well-moderated forum, for example?
If you’ve commented on TP before today: Unfortunately, Disqus didn’t give us full control of our data, so while we could import old comments and usernames, we couldn’t tie them to cloned user accounts/emails. So if you want to recapture the same username/comments you left through Disqus on TP before, send us a note and we’ll do it manually. Otherwise you can just start fresh.
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