First off, we want to thank everyone for their input into our new name, we ended up with over 800 suggestions, which included some really great suggestions as well as some NSFW and some hilarious ones (don’t worry we’ll be sharing all of them with you). Again thank you for your input, it was invaluable.
I’d also like to thank… just kidding, this isn’t an awards show.
It took us a long time to decide on a name and the moral of the story is name things is hard, extremely hard, specially when it is something you care so deeply about.
Decision Criteria
- Short and sweet - We aimed for 2 syllables, but would have accepted 3 if we found a perfect name
- Simple to understand (staying away from things like “nzb”) I’m sure many of you tried to explain NzbDrone to friends and family, it was always a chore to get them interested for me because I’d spend half the time explaining what an nzb is and never got to talk about what it actually did.
- Googleability, we wanted a name that was going to get us in the top 3 results without much trouble
- Domain name - we wanted something short to type and easy to remember
- Relevance - This wasn’t high on our list, but we did try to find a name that was relevant to what drone does
The Decision
After reading all 800+ names multiple times and tossing our own names into the ring, we went through several rounds of eliminations. Once we settled on a few possible names we would ask our close friends and family what they thought of each name and used their feedback to tweak names further.
We made the final decision yesterday around noon, and decided Sonarr is going to be NzbDrone’s new name. It was the first name that everyone really liked off the bat.
Why Sonarr?
It comes from sonar, it’s a way for us to see into total darkness and discover what’s out there.
We are also changing our old tag line “cut the cord” to “Dive in.” to be more in line with the ocean theme. The extra ‘r’ is there to help with domain, and searchability. also all the cool kids are doing it.
Next Steps
We couldn’t wait to tell the you guys about the name change so naturally we haven’t had time to actually re-brand anything yet. But over time you will see the following changes taking effect
- All of our web properties
*.nzbdrone.com
domain and sub domains will start to automatically redirect to sonarr.tv - References to NzbDrone will start being replaced with Sonarr
- As part of this migration all of our web properties will also be moving to HTTPS for improved security and privacy.
Update:
We created a mailing list that we will use to notify you about the binary name change (exe, windows service, folder paths and package are renamed from NznDrone to Sonarr). Please subscribe if you are interested to be notified.