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We launched Ars Pro, our ad-free subscription service, at the beginning of the year. At the time, we told you we wanted to hear your ideas on how to make Ars Pro and Ars Pro++ more compelling. And we’ve been listening. Last spring, we removed tracking scripts for subscribers. More recently, we added PayPal as a payment option in response to your feedback. Today, we’re excited to offer Classic View, an old-school way of browsing the front page.

When Ars launched in 1998—two whole decades ago—it was a simple site with the entire text of stories appearing on the front page. The only exceptions were things like Cæsar’s lengthy musings on the blue-and-white Power Macintosh G3 (“Bottom line: I like the machine”) and John Siracusa’s epic Mac OS X reviews. Everything else was right there on the front page for you to read.

Classic View isn’t exactly like the Ars of 20 years ago. Our stories are longer on average than they were back then, so putting the entire text of all of our stories on each page would result in an insane amount of scrolling. Instead, Ars Pro subscribers will see headlines, lower deks (the brief summaries that accompany story headlines), and the first three paragraphs of each story.