Identify Your Breyer Update - I Can Finally Share This Good News!

We are happy to announce that Identify Your Breyer (and its sister sites) are being updated!  Janice, who started IDYB, passed away unexpectedly in 2021.  Going forward, there will be three curators working together to manage the sites. We have been working with her family to carefully transfer all of the websites and set up things behind-the-scenes, and now that everything is finalized and we’ve been able to bring IDYB up-to-date, we’re pleased to announce this formally.  The curator group consists of three collectors:  Stephanie Michel of Minnesota,  Stephanie Van Horne of Quebec, Canada, and myself:  Eleda Towle of Maine.  We each bring a different skillset, but we all agree that Janice’s work and memory should be respected.  IDYB will always be her baby, and now it will live on in tribute to the twenty years she spent building it.

Please be patient with us, as we’re still learning how she coded the sites, and it will take us time to get everything organized (including new email addresses for questions and submissions), but you can look forward to the site being kept up-to-date going forward.  Having three people involved should provide stability for the site in the event one of us is unable to update it.  Future plans include making the site more user-friendly for new collectors -- without changing what we long-time collectors love about it. 

For the next several weeks, though, we'll be working on the important "framework" behind the scenes to make sure the code is brought up to date so it doesn't "break" as it has been doing for some viewers for a while now.  We also will need to set up new email accounts, as we don't want to access Janice's private emails, so we'd like to ask that you please hold off on sending emails and submissions for the time being.  We'll announce on the site when we're ready to take questions and submissions of photos and information.  This is a huge project, and we want to go slowly to do it well.  We hope you’ll support us as we take on this responsibility, and we look forward to hearing your feedback as we make progress.

For me, and I know I speak for the Stephanies as well, this is a huge honor.  Janice stayed out of sight for the most part, so few people realized how many hours every week she put into the site, until she passed and it sat untouched.  We feel like we're picking up the torch she had carried for so many years.  Going forward, updates will be posted to IDYB's homepage, so stay tuned.

~~ Added 9/1 at 7:pm EDT:

I just received a message saying that there was a rumor out there that "the new people" would be charging people to access the site.  I hate rumors.  To put that to rest: NO, absolutely not - There will never be a fee to access IDYB while the three of us are involved.   

We are not doing this for money, and we're all volunteering our time.  Currently I'm paying all the hosting fees.  Janice built the site out of love for the hobby, and that's how we'll carry it on.  Information should be accessible to everyone, both lifelong collectors and new collectors just starting out.