Dear IAM family,

The time has finally come. After 3 very long years, several false starts, thousands of man hours, dozens of people (most of whom aren’t the same people from the start), 3,714 emails between the developers, Mike, Jen and myself, hundreds of pages of designs, hundreds of thousands of lines of code, thousands of revisions and unfortunately my entire life savings! 🙂

We’ve been tweaking things left and right on the private beta to clean up as much as we can and have it 100% perfect with every feature ready to go but that’s the entire reason it’s called a beta! We need to have our community actively using it so that we can move forward with fresh eyes. As the community uses the beta, more and more features will be added, we had to draw the line some where and get everyone using it so that we could make all the other adjustments that we need to make with the system under heavy load.

I’m sending out this broadcast to all of IAM in order to let everyone know that we’re about to release the new version of IAM.BME.com. In order to make sure that we have the most up to date copy of the data, we’re going to have to turn IAM off for a couple of days prior to launching the new site. IAM will be offline starting Monday the 8th. It should be back online on Thursday the 11th.

We have spent the last several years going over and over the data, the old site and the new site to make sure that we are always advancing and giving you more than IAM & BME have ever been able to offer in the past.

With the initial launch, some features that you’re used to using may not be available initially, but please don’t worry! The site will continually be upgraded to keep BME/IAM in line with the rest of the internet. As I said before, we have to draw the line at some point with a feature set and get the community running on the new software in order to keep adding all of the features that we want IAM to have.

Please keep in mind that this is the first upgrade that IAM has received in well over a decade! I look forward to it and I appreciate your patience and understanding while we work out the kinks that arise with any upgrade!

While your journal entries, forums, messages and photos will all be imported, please take a moment to use the following tools to make a back up of your data. The “Diary Download” tool will make a file that contains your diary entries, their titles and the dates they were posted, including the HTML you may have included in the post. The “Photo Download” tool will make a zip file containing every image that you have ever uploaded to IAM (including those that you have removed access to from your page). Please allow some time for the tools to process and the downloads to complete. Some members have very large photo back up files and they will take some time to download depending on the speed of your connection.

Diary Download Link: http://iam.bmezine.com/iamback.exe?

Photo Download Link: http://iampix.bmezine.com/cgi-bin/photo-backup.cgi

While the over all “look and feel” of IAM will be changing, most of the way that IAM works will remain the same. We’ve even gone to great lengths to keep the IAM related MACRO tags working. All of the functions and features of IAM will still work and function the same way. The biggest “change” is that all of the various settings that you need to select to select things and make your IAM account function a certain way will have been moved to one “settings” page so that you don’t need to dig in various settings pages in order to find/change them. Our main goal was to make IAM easier to use. That was the main focus of the redesign.

The following MACROS WILL NOT be able to be imported to the new IAM. The reason that is is because those MACROS have been replaced with other MACROS or they have been built INTO other functions that operate a different way. Please remember that these features will be available but with things like your IAM page’s custom theme, you will have to recreate it on the new system.

• 1.In forums, the following functions will no longer be implemented: **NOINDEX**, **BOTTOMINDEX**, **INDEX**, **RTL** **TRANSCRIPT**
• 2.In diary entries: **NOBME** – This will no longer be necessary as your media will all be available in the “media” section of your profile. You decide what you want to share with IAM members, with BME or keep private.
• 3.In diary entries: – This function is not being imported. You can set your page to either “IAM Only” (this is the default) or to allow anyone.
• 4.Custom themes. These will not be imported. The new IAM uses a WYSIWYG editor and you will be able to easily customize your page using the new editor. If you want to save your current settings so you can refer back to them after the move, we encourage you to view your custom edit page and take a screen shot or copy the data in some way as once the move is made you will no longer be able to access that information.

If you have any questions, please EMAIL [email protected]. Jen, Mike and I will be very busy during the upgrade process so we will not be able to answer individual messages sent via IAM during this time but you will definitely be able to get a reply from Jen if you email [email protected].

Thank you for your continued support of BME. You are what makes BME possible and the place that it has grown to be today!

Rachel

p.s. Everyone’s IAM page is active as I just made sure to add time to all the accounts on IAM so if your friends haven’t logged in because they said their accounts have been expired.  So tell all your friends that their IAM account is active so they can come check out all the new features, as well as back up any of their data.