Sweat and thrills for the opening!

To all my dear readers,

Today is the opening of The BBC Music website.

You really can’t imagine how busy I was and how much hours I spent on the website to provide you with what you see actually.
I’ve been striving so hard that I felt the need to share with you what I’ve been through for these past days. In fact, the website will look very different in the coming weeks, but let me explain something before…

On August 27, a malware known as MWJS:2368 infiltrated The BBC Music website using a security issue with a script. To make things simple, there’s a script used on the website that resizes the images to display a thumbnail. This script allow users to set a thumbnail from an external website, and here is where things become tricky. The malware sweeps the web and look forward to exploit that feature from the script to allow unauthorized code to be uploaded straight to the core of the website. Now if only it would be just that, it wouldn’t be a big deal. But yeah you guessed it, the problem isn’t just this. The malware then attempt to penetrate into the server and grab every passwords and login on every website hosted on the same server. It modifies lots of files and litterally build his own code to upload malware directly on the computer of people navigating on the website.

I cleaned the website four times. The malware came back four times. 👿
How is that possible? Well, there’s over four thousands files that compose this website. There was nine websites infected. It represents thousands and thousands of files, of code line, etc. Even if we get rid of the core of the malware, it’s always possible that somewhere hides a small line of code that allows the malware to reinfect the website.

So… what do we do from now? I had to delete everything. Literally. Two weeks of hard work to improve the visual look, the pages, the articles, the images, the footer, the sidebar, the social icons, the links, everything… 😥

Folks, I was devastated, we were August 30th and I had to do everything back from scratch. But I didn’t abandon and I worked hard these past 48 hours to get everything back to normal at the expense of my precious sleep time. I lost a considerable amount of work but well, I guess that’s the perfect time to drop the popular slang “Sh** happens”.

Now let’s talk some more about the website in itself. A considerable amount of features will be added through time to this website. The layouts will change (both on YouTube, Twitter, the Website and the other networks). Also, some pages are still under construction but I decided to make them public as the community might be interested to participate to this project. Some tutorials are already in our scope but if you want to be involved in the development and see yourself listed on our VIP members (who will receive VIP treatment, of course), you can contact us here.

The MAJOR update that will be presented within the coming weeks is the transformation of the website into a real social community. As the project is now turning into something bigger, the music promotion is definitely not enough to entertain thousands of daily visitors. I want to develop a tool that will facilitate contact between every chainmail in the music world. That mean fans, artists, promoters, organizers and venues. Each and everyone has its own personnality and taste in music and one website can’t please 100% of its visitors. Basically, this is where the idea of a community come from. Everyone will be able to have its own profile, to invite friends, make connection, make their own playlists, easily contact an artist, a promoter, a venue, create a fan club, share an event and way too much things to mention (I wrote down everything on paper!). The community will definitely push this a step farther, once again.

I’ll always, always, always improve this project until everyone is overwhelmingly satisfied with it 😉

Now I could go on and write tons of ideas that my desk is probably sick of but I don’t want this article to go on forever.
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Thank you! 

To everyone for reading, listening, encouraging me, participating in this project, sharing with friends and everything.
To the artists who believed in  me, who are involved in this project and who help me to build it.
Your feedback is welcome, tell me what you think about the new The BBC Music!

Yours Truly,
Bastien Bournet-Charrier aka BBC