Mebious.co.uk
In the anime, a website whose url appears on a pressure guage on Lain's computer. In the real world, it is the website that is arguably the central hub on the Lain online community; several websites, including this one, have come from its visitors.
Mebious is known to have inane comments, random numbers and, periodically, text in Russian.
Despite the challenges such a chaotic environment poses, several people have managed to make contact through the site, and interact more in other places on the internet (to the annoyance of some of them).
It is a hobby of Mebious users to attempt to track down the website's creator, who is known to be called "Tadzio Troman-Taylor" (aka monkiesnake). He is notoriously difficult to find information about in comparison to Internet users.
Input fields
There are input boxes for text and images, labeled "in_txt" and "in_img", respectively. When an input fails, the "in_txt/img" button turns from green to red.
Text
10 lines of text are displayed at a time. Each row can have a maximum of 48 characters.
Some characters in each line of text randomly turn into symbols that look like the character in question. This only affects lower-case letters. This allows text to remain legible but makes it difficult to follow URLs.
Text may eventually reappear as part of the background image (bg_out).
Images
Those new to Mebious often have trouble with image uploading.
It is possible that there is a limit to the total file size that one user can attempt to upload per day. This means that if the limit is exceeded on the first attempt, then no images can be uploaded that day.
To be confirmed:
- What is the file size limit? (From the source code: name="MAX_FILE_SIZE" value="262144")
- Which filetypes are supported? (I believe jpg/png)
Images are randomly distorted, turned green and placed in the background.
Like text, images may eventually reappear as part of the background image.
History
In the middle of 2010, the first of now-familiar russian spam waves appeared.
Sometime in 2010, a suicidal person appeared on Mebious. Several people (or perhaps just one, it is impossible to know for sure) encouraged him or her to commit suicide, and some other group tried to convince them not to. This caused much controversy amongst the users. Someone claiming to be the same person appeared about a year later, stating that they had entered therapy and was doing better.
In early 2011, a troll who posted in ALL CAPS spammed Mebious. This incident has since been resolved.
On the 8th of November 2011, a spammer appeared, posting a URL amongst nonsensical combinations of English words. This incident has not yet been resolved. (May have cleared up now - Feb 2012)
In October 2012, someone decided to start frequently posting the word "lewd", for apparently no reason.
In late September of 2013 www.mebious.mobi starting redirecting to www.mebious.co.uk. The reason is unclear and as of October 10th mobi is down.
Since October of 2012 to October of 2013, Russian spam overwhelms the site. Many people find the site prior to watching SEL resulting in less than relevant posting. In addition, the site was linked to several forums and imageboards across the internet during the year, compounding the issue.
In late November 2016, the site went down for several days due to extreme spamming exceeding the site's allocated resources. This spamming also occurred on mebio.us, posted by a mentally unstable former community member that posed as a woman in Finland.
On November 12th, 2021, the Serial Experiments Lain (PlayStation game) Discord released a recreation of mebious written in Common Lisp titled “nmebious.” An instance of the website has been created at lovelain.net. The GitHub is also open for others to deploy their own instances.
Projects
External Links
- Mebious.co.uk, the site in question
- Mebious.mobi (article), a website inspired by Mebious.co.uk and has additional functions such as music upload.
- nmebious, a recreation of Mebious in Common Lisp