Bob Arnold died and his family evidently turned the servers off. Some of the sites above were hosted on his machines and some just had their DNS (net pointer system) hosted there.

The DNS problems will be sorted in a day or so, the site outages will probably take a bit longer.

See other blogs and announcements here for news and to read about Bob Arnold and what he did for the community.

Hugs to all,
Erin

I don't have any further details yet. I'm trying to get information from the county sheriff's office.

Hugs to all,
Erin

Earlier this morning we passed 15,000 stories/chapters on site and are currently adding new story postings at a rate of 90 to 150 a week. This is 2 to 5 times as fast, on average, as the next most active TG fiction website, Fictionmania, which has more than 18,000 tales/chapters in its archive. We ARE catching up. :)

Thanks to all the authors and editors who contribute their efforts and thanks to all the commenters and readers who encourage the authors.

Hugs,
Erin

An incident happened this morning. Those involved know what happened. I got angry and shut the site down to cool off so that I did not say things I would regret or ban anyone.

The rule here is friendly. If the comment, blog or forum post you want to make is not friendly ... don't make it. Next time, I think I will have to ban a few people. I don't want to do that so please don't test me on it.

Haven't been on most of the day due to minor computer problems. My Time Machine backup disk turned flakey on me so I had to go to town, buy a new one and, bring it home and reformat it for MacOS and install. Not really a big deal, but I got a decent drive instead of a cheapie and that took some research.

Hugs,
Erin

The devastation in northern Alabama seems to have affected our member Stanman who has not been onsite since early Thursday morning. Let us hope that it is just disruption of internet or electricity and that Stan is okay. There may be other BC members who are having connectivity problems in this extreme weather, remember them also.

Hugs to all,
Erin

Yes, I do. Maybe that's why BC is home to so many of them and such good ones. Who doesn't want their daily or weekly dose of their favorite serial? Well...

In about three hours, we will hit the 15 millionth visitor to BCTS since the beginning of the new count in June of 2005. If it's you, duck!

And thanks!

Hugs,
Erin

There's a situation that has developed with a publisher of TG fiction. This person is a member of the community and at last report is attempting to straighten things out and make things right with the affected authors. I don't think much else needs to be said here at the moment.

Hugs,
Erin

We're having ribs! See you there!

Hugs,
Erin

The comment section attached to a story is no place for long running arguments. Especially arguments that have been going on for years and have very little to do with the story they are attached to. Thanks.

Hugs,
Erin

Well, the two month long Short Story Months Challenge on the theme of Second Chances had two notable and outstanding entries.

Here's a link to the latest update of the nominations list: http://bigclosetr.us/topshelf/book/25855/bc-v1-nominations-t...

It can't make up its mind. First it rains hard enough to scare the dog with the rattle of big drops against the windows and roof then we have ten minutes of big wet flakes falling in stillness, then the sky whistles and chuffs and it rains again, drops as big cashews, twisted by the wind.

Here's the idea, a trade paperback of around 300-320 pages featuring some of the best stuff that has appeared on BigCloset over the last eleven years and perhaps some new stuff, too. The book would be 6x9 inches, more or less, and retail for $15. That's around 100,000 words, btw. The book would be available to be ordered here on BC, through Amazon and possibly through other channels. There might be an electronic edition which would probably be sold for $10. And we might put the electronic edition into the Hatbox for contributors.

It's my dog Cuddles birthday today, she's seven and is getting a small bite of blueberry waffle to celebrate!

Oh, yeah, it's Groundhog Day, too, and bright and sunny here so that probably means six more weeks of winter for us, but luckily it's cloudy or even worse in most of the country. :)

Hugs,
Erin

A spammer promoting tours of West Bengal in Afrikaans? WTF?

One more spammer down, 367,955,403 to go.

Hugs,
Erin

Properly capitalization in the title box really isn't that hard. In most browsers, if you just start typing the new title, it will fill in the most recent one, then you backspace over the number and retype that and the title is correct. But there have been a lot of misspelled, misspaced and miscapitalized titles lately. They look bad on the story and they look bad on the site. Sometimes titles are in ALL CAPS and if they are more than one short word long, I feel that should be fixed, too.

How should I deal with this:

We've only had SEVENTEEN stories posted today. What's the matter with you people? :)

For the past month, from November 16 to December 15, we've AVERAGED over 19.5 stories a day.

For the past week, we've averaged almost 17000 visitors a day! For the busiest five hours of the day, we're averaging about 1000 visitors an hour. Sometimes, there are as many as 390 people all visiting a page within the same five minute window!

No wonder the searches were bringing us down!

The site was out for about an hour due to an attack or just a clumsy bot hanging the site by trying to use the search. Search is off while we keep trying to figure out what was going on.

Hugs,
Erin

Check out the announcement at Stardust; assuming your DNS cache has caught up, you should see a blog post labeled, "New Road to the Stars".

Hugs,
Erin