BugMeNot is broken.
Update: It looks like it's more than broken, it looks dead. Where once there was a front end into a database full of logins for all those news sites that follow the odious practice of requiring intrusive private information before they will let you peek at their content, there now is only a naked directory with only one accessible file, and that is a piece of Microsoft boilerplate.
I don't have the whois info from BugMeNot from before this terrible thing happened, so I don't know if the site has been hijacked, or if it has just had the meat stripped from its bones. Either way, the result is ugly. None of the PHP scripts that drove the former site are there any more. I find myself thinking in conspiracies: did one of the big news sites drive BugMeNot off the web? Did a hacker from the media get in and delete all the files?
I have a feeling that the death of this site, if the facts become known, could be a newsworthy item. I find it inconceivable that the people who ran the site would leave a naked index, with no explanation whatsoever, while they revamp it or whatever.
Where is BugMeNot? What have you done with it? The world wants to know.
Posted on August 19, 2004 08:33 AM