Ames Fan Club UPDATE

[C. Fontaine]

Hello All-


Well, it's been a hot minute since amesfanclub.com has been offline.  661 days to be exact.  A lot has happened since the last post on the forum.  It's amazing how fast and sudden things can change.  A virus shut the world down in a matter of a weekend.  We have a new president.  And now we're looking at the new cold or even world war.


As for us - hackers shut down a small grassroots website and it's hosting company held it hostage.


I made a resolution this year - 20 years since the closure of Ames - that I would return this site to it's former glory and become and active part of this resilient community again. I apologize deeply for the time that this site has been down and more importantly for withholding the community you all became a part of.  It would be nothing without everything every one of you has contributed.


The site suffered a significant malware attack almost 2 years ago forcing my web host to suspend my account until all was cleaned up and where ever the exploit was - was found and fixed.  There is no evidence my databases or any personal information were compromised, it was moreso a bot had found a backdoor onto my webspace to host phishing and malware.  My web space hosted multiple other websites among other half done personal projects and deprecated pieces of this website, to which I admit was very sloppy and failed to clean up, so it could have been anywhere.  I unfortunately did not have the time or in some ways expertise to clean this up, my host would have gladly done it for me - to the tune of $1200, which I did not and still do not have the resources for.


Ultimately I did much digging and paring myself over this time and found help to secure the remainder, but my host would not approve my site unless I paid their own third party "cybersecurity experts".  So now I am now with a new host.


With all the above said I have no excuse other than I have not had the time to dedicate to this site.  Life, children, careers, got in the way.  For that I am deeply grateful to our admins who did an amazing job keeping up and maintaining things, and I hope will continue.


The site/forum is back up and all posts have been restored up until the site went down.  Everything will look a bit different here as we continue to reupload and reintegrate everything.


Okay, enough soapboxing.




I hope you can come back and continue this great community we have built for almost 20 years.  We became one of the online dead retail OG's.  We truly have welcomed people from every walk of life over our time together.


I completely understand if you have moved on and certainly expect some attrition after all this time.  For that I again give you my deepest apologies.  I can only ask that you keep in touch and trust me when I say, the Ames Fan Club is back!



Cheers, Chris