On 30 September 2018 we will be retiring GuardianWitness. You can continue to contribute to the Guardian via community callouts, which you can find in the Community section.

GuardianWitness has played a vital role in our newsroom; it created an easy way for readers to share their stories with our journalists.

The quality has been extraordinarily high – 85% of contributions were approved by the reviewing team. And some of those that weren’t published were news tips shared by readers with our reporters. Many reader contributions were published online and in the Guardian and Observer newspapers in the UK.

Times have changed and the GuardianWitness platform is no longer the way the vast majority of our readers choose to share their stories and collaborate with the Guardian. Many contribute views and experiences via community callouts, which range from breaking news to single issues and regular series.

We’re very proud of what the GuardianWitness community has achieved. However, given how many other ways readers are finding to share stories with us, both on our site and through social media, we have taken the decision to close the platform.

Thank you to everyone who contributed through GuardianWitness and joined this vibrant online community.

How can you continue to contribute?

Closing GuardianWitness does not mean we no longer want readers to collaborate in our journalism. In fact we want you to be closer to us and and to incorporate more of your stories and views. Take a look at the new home for readers’ content on the Guardian at theguardian.com/community, where you can find out more about the various ways to participate in our coverage.

What happens next?

From today, no new GuardianWitness assignments will be opened and any open ones will now be closed. If you used the platform to share with us, you will have the opportunity to download all of your contributions until 30 September.

To download your contributed content, go to your profile section on witness.theguardian.com, sign in if prompted and click download.

We will be closing the witness.theguardian.com subdomain on 30 September. Your Guardian account will still remain active, but you will no longer see the GuardianWitness tab. Contributions that were only published on thesubdomain will no longer be available online. If your contribution was published on theguardian.com or in our newspapers, it will remain available to the public.

A small selection of contributions considered to be significant to the history of the Guardian will be retained for future projects or shared with the Guardian Foundation for the GNM archive.

Apart from the above contributions, after 30 September we will take the necessary steps to delete all data relating to your GuardianWitness interactions.

If you have any further queries, you can get in touch with our user support teamby emailing userhelp@theguardian.com.