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[MJPC]

November 4th, 2012

Dear MJPC Members:

As you no doubt have noticed, last week our site was hacked and many of the Javascript driven areas of our site (including our Gallery) no longer properly function.  

Due to limited financial resources, we have been running an outdated version of the IPB software (and on a cheaper "shared" hosting platform), and it has left us vulnerable to a variety of security holes, and a web site that is slower and much less efficient than it should be.

MJPhotosCollectors.com is a non-profit hobby based web site, run by MJ fans just like you.  For us, building and maintaining this web site has been a “labor of L.O.V.E.” for nearly 2 1/2 years now.  Our web site represents several 1000's of hours of work by volunteer staff members who freely give of their time to make sure that MJPC is the best it can possibly be.  During this time we have built a photo gallery with nearly 60,000 categorized Michael Jackson photos, and served nearly TEN MILLION image views.

To date, our web site has operated free to our nearly 20,000 registered members, thanks to the support of a handful of loyal VIP Members.  But because of the issues now affecting the functionality of our web site, we are forced to make some very hard decisions if we are to continue to keep this site open for all of you in the future.  

To begin, we must immediately upgrade our site to the latest version of the IP Board software, and rebuild our site on that new platform.  Because none of us here are expert computer programmers or web developers, we have had to hire a professional to assist us in this.  We have already begun this process (taking a significant sum of money out of our own, shallow pockets), but we don’t yet have the resources to complete it.  

This upgrade, once completed, should resolve the current issues our site is now experiencing.  However, once the upgraded site is online and thoroughly tested, we must switch our site to a faster hosting platform--and due to the massive size of our site (nearly 25GB) that will not be a cheap endeavor.  However, this transition is necessary to make our web site more efficient, and to facilitate the future growth of our Photo Gallery (which by itself is already more than 23GB!!)

Therefore, we encourage you to support our site today by becoming a VIP member or making a small donation to ensure we have the resources to complete the upgrade and continue to maintain our web site going forward.  Our target goal to accomplish this objective is to raise $275.00.  A small sum by most measures, but due to the rising administrative and hosting costs of our site, it is becoming more and more difficult for us to finance all of these costs by ourselves.

If you can't afford the $24.95 to become a supporting VIP, please consider making a small one time donation of $10 (or even just $5) to help us reach our goal.   All Donators of $10 or more will permanently be added to our Site Credits page, and you will know that you did your part to help keep our site online.  

A lot of MJ fan and photo sites have come and gone over the years and we want to make sure that MJPC is still around for years to come…and YOU can help make that happen with your donation.  This is YOUR web site, not ours.  If you care about its future existence for all of us to enjoy, please prove it by supporting our site today (and why not encourage a friend to match your donation as well?!)

So why not YOU? Why not NOW? Please share your donation today.

~~Team MJPC~~

P.S. We ask for your patience over the next several days as we upgrade and rebuild our web site.  We hope to have the new site fully operational as soon as possible.  Thanks in advance to everyone out there willing to assist us in bringing our new site online.