Hi wonderful people! It's Jamie, you know, that behind the scenes part of the BCTS staff. I haven't been around much lately because I've been homeless. It's been a really rough journey for me since my car accident back in February, and things are finally figuring itself out slowly. This stupid virus has been making it really hard, especially because I am in NYC to get services now.

THANK YOU ALL!

We made the goal an hour ago and covered our debt with the bank and a bit left over. Thanks to all the generous people who contributed, it makes us tearful and glad that we have so many friends.

The $2125 is enough for a bit of a cushion as we know there is one more bill out there that may hit before we get other monies coming in at the end of the month.

We still have our ordinary January bills ahead of us, so if you want to contribute, here's the link again:

Happy Canada Day to all our friends in the True North!

Hugs,
Erin

Sorry about the outage earlier folks. The virtual boot image for one of our front-end servers recently corrupted so I pulled it out of the hunt group while I work on it. Around the same time I decided to process upgrades on the remaining 2 front ends, using the standard rolling reboot pattern that I usually do but with one server down I forgot that we were short coverage while the front ends finish their boot process and really get rolling.

I've been trying to tackle various jobs around the website and, truth to tell, I just don't have the concentration to be effective. Things may slide for a few days.

Hugs,
Erin

Read the first article:

http://www.arrl.org/news/cq-announces-its-2016-hall-of-fame-...

We all miss Bob and he was important not only to us but to several other communities across the country and the world.

Hugs,
Erin

We currently have 3 bug reports in the wild.

A survey for and about members and visitors to BigCloset TopShelf...

I've been getting phony emails purporting to be from Docusign asking for my signature on a document. Problem immediately is we don't use Docusign; although we do send out documents for signing, we use a different service.

Also, Docusign's place on the web is docusign.com. These emails come from a website that is NOT Docusign.

Beware. At least one of the one's I received claimed to be an attempt at a money transfer which, if I had opened it, would probably have turned out to be an attempt at getting my bank info.

BEWARE.

This is just an FYI. We have detected, and are currently mitigating, a small scale DDoS attack against one of our VPS host nodes. Because this VPS host currently hosts assets for YourBigCloset it could possibly affect the performance of BigCloset as we host some of our VideoAds from YourBigCloset. This is just an FYI and we don't know if it has any relation to Bigcloset.

Hey Everyone!

This is just a note to let you know that we are getting ready to release some new features and upgrades to BigCloset. Some of these upgrades have been attempted in the past and broke a lot of our custom changes to the front page.

So it is entirely possible they will break again, but I promise you I will be working just as fast as possible to get everything working again.

Unfortunately while I've tried to put off these upgrades because of the havoc they may cause, they have recently become urgent.

Hey Everyone.

I wanted apologize for the delay in getting the site back online today.

What happened is that one of our many elves happened to click a wrong button causing all of the "Author Taxonomy" to disappear. That may sound like an easy fix, of just rolling back the database, but in doing so we would have lost a couple new stories, and blogs that we didn't want to disappear.

Piper will be tuning the intranet and switches connecting our various servers; so expect brief outages, probably lasting no more than a few minutes as she disconnects and reconnects various cables and occasionally reboots machines to activate new configurations. Please be patient and forbearing. :)

Thanks and hugs,
Erin

While Piper, Cat and I will have our phones and laptops with us, none of us will be home for several hours. Piper and Cat will be at the server farm, installing equipment and getting things ready to move our servers into our new cabinet. I'll be goofing off at a friend's house playing boardgames and drinking coffee.

Bookmarks are back on the My Accounts page, I don't seem to be able to make the link work from the front page. Sorry about that. Will look at it again later.

Hugs,
Erin

We're broke.

We need about $1450 by Friday, 17 September, or some people are going to be paid late.

It's the middle of the month. We have $141 in our bank accounts.

How to give to the support of the site is detailed in the right hand column under the heading The Hatbox and at the bottom of this blog.

We've had expenses associated with the upgrade to some of our servers but thanks to everyone who has helped us stay on top of things.

Any amount is appreciated and gifts are really the way we manage to keep doing this.

3001! It's amazing!

There is nothing Easy about Falling Off a Bike 3001 Times!

Congratulations, Angharad, who has single-handed written almost 10% of the story posts on BigCloset!

Huzzah!

And hugs,
Erin and the crew

Keeping it simple, we need money to pay bills and I personally am overdrawn on my bank account because I have not been paying myself in order to pay BC bills. Anything anyone can send will be appreciated.

Update: We just got notice from our Denver hosting company. They are going to force us to upgrade the hardware we are hosting with them. So, we will have a onetime expense of as much as $1000-$2000 and our monthly $240 a month is likely to go up too.

Here's the usual info:

Right now, today, Sunday 21 of May, we have hit our goal for the month. Your support is much appreciated and I will update the sidebar tomorrow to show today's numbers.

Continuing gifts in any amount will be applied to next months goal and much appreciated.

Here's the usual info:

Newest Update: We have about $1800 due Friday and we have less than $500 in our bank accounts.

Not completely unexpected but we got hit with a tax bill for $800+, higher than expected, and now Felix has to deal with the expenses related to Katie's death, about $1600, without Katie's income, and we want to help out.

Accordingly, we are going to increase the April goal for the Hatbox to $5000. Yeah, I know that's a lot and to be frank, we're not really expecting to make it but we just wanted everyone to know that that is what we are going to be trying to pay out of our own resources.

Here's the usual info:

We're going to turn off new member sign-up for the weekend as this seems to be part of the code that is causing the problem. So if you want to join the site, please be patient and we will fix this as soon as can be.

Hugs,
Erin