Maintainers of The Old Reader have announced that the service will no longer be accepting new registrations, the service itself will be shutting down in two weeks and existing accounts migrated to a private site.

The Old Reader, which got that name because it is a continuation of Google’s old RSS reader code, was started as a hobby of sorts by a very small group of friends. It was one of several online RSS Feed services that was promoted as an alternative to Google’s online RSS Feed service after Google announced that its service will be shutting down (it has since shut down).

I signed up for an account on The Old Reader in March just to test it, but never really used it for more than a few days (I’ve always preferred and used a local RSS Feed application). The problem with The Old Reader was that it became too popular and, therefore, has become too much of a hassle to maintain than the “very small group of friends” have time for.

So it has to go, sort of. Here are a couple of paragraphs from the announcement by the lead maintainers:

We have closed user registration, and we plan to shut the public site down in two weeks. We started working on this project for ourselves and our friends, and we use The Old Reader on a daily basis, so we will launch a separate private site that will keep running. It will have faster refresh rate, more posts per feed, and properly working full-text search — we are sure that we can provide all this at a smaller scale without that much drama, just like we were doing before March.

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Accounts will be migrated to the private site automatically. We will whitelist everybody we know personally, along with all active accounts that were registered before March 13, 2013 — those are the people who had consciously signed up for The Old Reader rather than were simply looking for “a Google Reader replacement”. And of course, we will migrate all our awesome supporters and people who donated to keep the project running (if you sent us bitcoins, please get in touch to get identified). Later this week your account will get a distinct indication whether it will be migrated to the private site or not. If you see that message and believe that it’s wrong, or if all your friends are getting migrated and you are left behind — please, drop us a line.

Read the complete post here.