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"And today, it happened again. This time on reocities.com, my rescue attempt for geocities where it helped to pay for the hosting. After serving up the ads for

"And today, it happened again. This time on reocities.com, my rescue attempt for geocities where it helped to pay for the hosting. After serving up the ads for a while suddenly I'm shown a nice blank rectangle where the ads were before. No explanation" Uh... maybe the fact that it's a bunch of stolen content? To the OP, I realise you're trying to do a noble thing, but that content is not public domain. Trying to preserve it is cool. Trying to profit off it is not so cool. Bit of a grey area and it's easy to just turn you off than get into some heated, obviously biased discussion with the site owner.

jacquesm 16y ago
> Trying to profit off it is not so cool. I don't think that 'profit' means the same to you as it does to me. At adsense income levels reocities will never be profitable, and I have a couple of thousand thank you notes collected by now that prove that on the whole people are pretty happy that I did what I did. People that request removal of their pages have it backed up now (I do that for whoever asks to create a zip file of all their content), and those that don't want their old stuff online any more because it is either inaccurate or because they can't update it (reocities is 'read only'). In some cases they want it removed because they put private info online back when everybody did that or because they are now professional designers and don't want their geocities stuff to haunt them. And, of course, whoever asks has their content removed, once every month or so I filter my inbox on 'reocities' and 'geocities' to process the removal requests. It's still a manual process, that's how little it gets requested, but I probably should automate it somehow. If in the long run reocities contains no pages and all the stuff has been moved to the proper owners again then I'll be more than happy, that would be the best outcome. Having some adsense ads in there was a way to offset some (but not all by a long shot) of the hosting costs.
- dingdingding 16y ago
  Why don't you spend an hour or two and make it read/write ?
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    Because I'd be flooded with spam.
    - dingdingding 16y ago
      That's not necessarily true. I agree with the other guy that you are really just scraping content and trying to profit off it. If people really wanted to save their content, they could have done that. Most of what you have is probably abandoned.
      - jacquesm 16y ago
        > I agree with the other guy that you are really just scraping content and trying to profit off it. You can agree with him as much as you want, it just isn't true. > If people really wanted to save their content, they could have done that. Part of the problem here was that yahoo did a pretty bad job at communicating their intention to the people that had their sites there. Essentially Yahoo tried to convert the 'holdouts' from the free portion of the site to paid hosting accounts 'or else'. When they pulled the plug it left 10's of millions of accounts up in the air. There were several attempts at rescuing as much of geocities as could be done, the fact that you don't know any of this isn't really your fault, after all your account is all of 40 minutes old, but when it happened it was fairly widely publicised both here on HN and in the regular media. > Most of what you have is probably abandoned. You'd be surprised.
- flatulent1 16y ago
  The bottom of your daz home page and others says "all rights reserved", but text on the homepage says the database is GPL'd "The data on this site was bootstrapped using the freedb.org data set (yes, our database will remain GPL'd, no strings attached)' What version of the GPL are you using, where is the (database)download link and a copy of the GPL? It is an oversimplification to say no strings attached. Unless the content is all already GPLed, I think there is a problem with you trying to assign a license to work you didn't create. You certainly can't say all rights reserved (restrict rights) if you're dealing with GPLed work of others. (what's free must remain free) I see some band photos. I seriously doubt the the rights holders released them under the GPL. The banner "share your music" and taking MP3 uploads seems like a serious issue too. As does distributing 30 second clips. iTunes and music stores that do that have agreements allowing it. Do you? And posting peoples geocities sites without their permission? It isn't your content. A notice saying you'll taking it down doesn't make it okay. Just because they haven't discovered your site and had a note survive that mail you check once a month... Right holders should not have to comb the net looking for abuses. Even the many that may like the idea may not know to update their content. (I'd expect you'd also have trouble authenticating them) You really need to contact every former page owner and have their advance permission (and give them editing rights along with some sort of terms of service) A bunch of thanks yous are great, but you'd get that for MP3s too. It doesn't mean there's not a problem. Good luck sorting it all out in a proper way.

jacquesm 16y ago

> Trying to profit off it is not so cool. I don't think that 'profit' means the same to you as it does to me. At adsense income levels reocities will never be profitable, and I have a couple of thousand thank you notes collected by now that prove that on the whole people are pretty happy that I did what I did. People that request removal of their pages have it backed up now (I do that for whoever asks to create a zip file of all their content), and those that don't want their old stuff online any more because it is either inaccurate or because they can't update it (reocities is 'read only'). In some cases they want it removed because they put private info online back when everybody did that or because they are now professional designers and don't want their geocities stuff to haunt them. And, of course, whoever asks has their content removed, once every month or so I filter my inbox on 'reocities' and 'geocities' to process the removal requests. It's still a manual process, that's how little it gets requested, but I probably should automate it somehow. If in the long run reocities contains no pages and all the stuff has been moved to the proper owners again then I'll be more than happy, that would be the best outcome. Having some adsense ads in there was a way to offset some (but not all by a long shot) of the hosting costs.

dingdingding 16y ago
Why don't you spend an hour or two and make it read/write ?
- jacquesm 16y ago
  Because I'd be flooded with spam.
  - dingdingding 16y ago
    That's not necessarily true. I agree with the other guy that you are really just scraping content and trying to profit off it. If people really wanted to save their content, they could have done that. Most of what you have is probably abandoned.
    - jacquesm 16y ago
      > I agree with the other guy that you are really just scraping content and trying to profit off it. You can agree with him as much as you want, it just isn't true. > If people really wanted to save their content, they could have done that. Part of the problem here was that yahoo did a pretty bad job at communicating their intention to the people that had their sites there. Essentially Yahoo tried to convert the 'holdouts' from the free portion of the site to paid hosting accounts 'or else'. When they pulled the plug it left 10's of millions of accounts up in the air. There were several attempts at rescuing as much of geocities as could be done, the fact that you don't know any of this isn't really your fault, after all your account is all of 40 minutes old, but when it happened it was fairly widely publicised both here on HN and in the regular media. > Most of what you have is probably abandoned. You'd be surprised.
flatulent1 16y ago
The bottom of your daz home page and others says "all rights reserved", but text on the homepage says the database is GPL'd "The data on this site was bootstrapped using the freedb.org data set (yes, our database will remain GPL'd, no strings attached)' What version of the GPL are you using, where is the (database)download link and a copy of the GPL? It is an oversimplification to say no strings attached. Unless the content is all already GPLed, I think there is a problem with you trying to assign a license to work you didn't create. You certainly can't say all rights reserved (restrict rights) if you're dealing with GPLed work of others. (what's free must remain free) I see some band photos. I seriously doubt the the rights holders released them under the GPL. The banner "share your music" and taking MP3 uploads seems like a serious issue too. As does distributing 30 second clips. iTunes and music stores that do that have agreements allowing it. Do you? And posting peoples geocities sites without their permission? It isn't your content. A notice saying you'll taking it down doesn't make it okay. Just because they haven't discovered your site and had a note survive that mail you check once a month... Right holders should not have to comb the net looking for abuses. Even the many that may like the idea may not know to update their content. (I'd expect you'd also have trouble authenticating them) You really need to contact every former page owner and have their advance permission (and give them editing rights along with some sort of terms of service) A bunch of thanks yous are great, but you'd get that for MP3s too. It doesn't mean there's not a problem. Good luck sorting it all out in a proper way.