Come Join Us

For those of you still with us. We’ve setup a new (temporary?) site where we can all connect with each other and share our photos and stories again. SOCIAL.BME.COM is that place and we hope you’ll join us. While I don’t expect a swarm of people signing up, due to the currently limited resources, we’re doing a controlled rollout to ensure the performance and availability of what little we have online right now.

The software is called Mastodon, it’s a decentralized social networking software. At this time we’re keeping this community (node) private. Meaning your posts do not show up on the network (only on this node), nor do they show up to non-logged in users. Currently we have no plans of opening it completely public, but it’s not impossible. Of course any future changes to visibility will be communicated to all users.

We hope to see you there.

https://social.bme.com/invite/uqpMbjaC

-jonathon

To The BME Community

I hope you might remember me, my name is Nefarious. My childhood was surrounded by BME and I have missed it in the past years, so hello I hope you are doing well.  As you may already know, today 10 years ago my dad Shannon Larratt passed away. And if you were not aware, my mom Rachel Larratt passed away last year in June. Together they built BME and created a place where people truly had freedom. BME may have not been as active recently as it was in the past, but I do not want to let it die with them. Unfortunately through those years of neglect, the site and community have deteriorated. Since my mom’s passing we have been dealing with hosting issues, unforeseen struggles, and a string of bad luck. We’re still gaining full control over some accounts. It is very complicated, but we are asking for patience. We are trying to get it back, but this time it will take longer than it has before.

I cannot promise that the millions of photos and videos since its inception in 1996 are safe right now, but if it does come to it, together we can create a new collection. Jon, Jen, Marks and I have worked tirelessly trying to keep BME online, and we will continue to do so. In the meantime we will keep this blog running, and we are launching a private website that will allow us to stay connected.

Times have changed and so have all of you. BME on the other hand has had nearly no changes in the past 15 years. We are overdue for more than just a makeover and recent events mean that BMEShop is our only source of income right now. If you ever want to make suggestions, or even just want to send a friendly letter, please reach out at [email protected]

– Nefarious

We’re still here. We’re not giving up.

I wanted to provide another update since it’s a new year. As you can tell I’ve not managed to import any of the old Moblog content yet, but I’m hoping to work on that soon. I was away for the holiday spending time with family. I believe I have been able to fix the main site billing issues so you should hopefully be able to create new subscriptions or if you had one that expired over the holiday it should renew very soon.

We are continuing to keep the site alive and online and we’re working in the background on some plans for the future. Please stay tuned, as we hope to make some announcements on the future path for BME. Thank you all for the support.

-jonathon

We’re back, but…

As you can see we’re not quite 100%. We were able to recover file backups (images, scripts, etc) of the sites on the machine we lost. However we’ve not been able to recover database backups (posts, comments, etc). On top of that the backup server in our rack has crashed and isn’t responding. We may need to get someone to physically reboot the machine which will take more time. And even if we get that server back online we don’t know if we’ll be able to find what we need*. I’m really sorry, and I assure you nobody is more upset about it than I am. Jen and I will continue to do our best to keep things running until we have a clear plan of what the future will be.

In the mean time we’ve setup a new blog and we’ll do our best to provide some meaningful updates and regular content for you. The theme isn’t quite what it was but I hope it brings some kind of familiarity while we work on recovery.

If you’re reading this and you care about BME, we’d love for you to leave a comment as a show of support so we know you’re all out there. This feels like a very lonely place right now and that is very much the anti-thesis of what BME stands for.

Sorry I don’t have any good news.

* We’re working on scraping the internet archive for old posts and comments.

-jonathon