Gothic BC

Online since October 1998, Gothic BC is the hobby and pet project of Atratus (Michael R. Barrick). Originally not much more than a link to the Van-Goth and Gothic BC mailing lists on eGroups.com, Gothic BC grew over the years to the point where the site received about a half a million page views every month from well over four thousand unique visitors in its heyday.

It was with the addition of the photogallery in October of 2000 when the site really began to take off. The main photogallery now contains 63458 photographs. Here you will find a visual history of the BC scene no other site can come close to.

Later in 2002, after the purchase and subsequent bastardising of eGroups (formerly OneList) by YahooGroups, the Gothic BC mailing list was moved to a non-commercial server thanks to Avi, who also hosts Sanctuary Radio. It has since been moved back to YahooGroups, but it is little used these days.

Also in 2002 the Gothic BC Livejournal community was started and remains functional, but little used since the advent of Facebook. Gothic BC also has a presence on facebook, started in 2008.

With the help of Valerian (Elaine Foster), former webmistress of Gothic Unlimited, a Café Press store was added in 2004. Also in 2004, helped out by some generous donations, a server upgrade opened the door to adding a message forum and Valerian stepped up to the role of co-moderator of the forum and helped provide content for the site—a role she relinquised in January of 2017. Gothic BC merchadise was removed from the Café Press store around the same time. 

In 2008 the site was entirely redeveloped moved to a dedicated host with gobs more bandwidth. Products from Zazzle.com were added to the merch offerings, now available in Canadian dollars with Canadian shipping at Zazzle.ca.

On November 8, 2008 we celebrated our 10-year anniversary at Club 23 West with an event called Decadence. The current version of the site was developed "month of Sundays" fashion over the course of 2012 and 2013 in an effort the remove all of the legacy code and proprietary dependencies in the site.

The site is largely just a historical archive at this point with only occasional updates and maintenance to keep things operating. Keep an eye on Atratus' blog for updates.