Although SymAtlas has served us well over the years, it’s finally time for its graceful retirement. We’ve been keeping it running on life support for quite some time now (with varying degrees of success).

We’ve tried to make the transition from SymAtlas to BioGPS a gradual one. In BioGPS’s early stages, we had them running in parallel, and we purposely modeled the BioGPS gene report after the SymAtlas design. In August 2008, we posted a prominent link from SymAtlas to BioGPS, noting our plans for the future. In March 2009, we then actively started redirecting traffic from the SymAtlas home page to BioGPS, while leaving users a “backdoor” to access the old site. A couple months ago, we started redirecting “deep links” to specific SymAtlas pages to the corresponding BioGPS pages (again, leaving a “backdoor” for resistant users). At that time, we also forced users from the SymAtlas front page to go to BioGPS (a move that in retrospect I wish we’d delayed).

Starting shortly after the Thanksgiving holiday, this transition will be complete. We will force all traffic from SymAtlas to BioGPS with no exceptions. If you had a bookmarked link or were following a link to specific SymAtlas page, we’ll try to get you to the right page in BioGPS. If you’ve been resistant to migrate to BioGPS, you should know that acceptance by the majority of our the community has been phenomenal. Moreover, over 80% of users who were given the choice between continuing to BioGPS and going back to SymAtlas chose the “right option”.

If there are still loyal SymAtlas hold outs, please let us know why you haven’t migrated over to BioGPS. We’ll do our best to satisfy your needs. But overall, we strongly believe that BioGPS offers a brighter future with more and better features.