Geocities just won't die - advice? | Hacker News Reader

Geocities just won't die - advice?

8 pointstonteldoos2 comments

In the last 6 months, I've had to send two separate requests to sites cloning the original Geocities, asking them to take down my content (and another one a few months before that). This includes things that I really shouldn't have put on the open internet (resume, etc), but I was young, and sites like google and pipl weren't yet that good at tracking down arbitrary bits of information.

While I understand that there is some merit in reconstructing the Geocities sites (either for otherwise lost bits of arbitrary information, or for nostalgia's sake), my questions are:

1] How long will these sites keep on popping up? 2] Is it really legal for them to mirror expired (and copyrighted) information in the way they're doing? 3] Is there a way to flag my information as 'not to be rehosted', and require potential mirrors to check this list first (think do-not-call register)? 4] Has anyone else run into this problem at all?

For reference, the two most recent ones are geocities.ws and reocities.com. I cannot recall the first one's name, unfortunately.

Not the advice you're looking for but in all honesty, its not worth bothering or caring about this. As its been said a million times over, once something is on the internet, its there forever. I wouldn't worry about clones or old info or anything like that, no matter how much you hate for that to be out there. Its not worth your time.

Old stuff, new stuff, literally everything on the internet gets reposted somewhere (sometimes thousands upon thousands of times over again) and there will always be clones of something. Its a losing war and one not even worth thinking about in the first place.

1:

Forever. Assume anything posted online is there forever.

2:

Not really. But then, most people don't care, and the only culture we'll have in the future is the stuff people copy now, don't be angry at them for your mistakes. In the grand scheme of things they're doing a good thing.

3:

If geocities was still up I'd say robots.txt. At this point however, I don't think there's any service that can help you.

4:

Yes. (I have.) I think most of generation Z will have this problem. But it won't become obvious to the mainstream for a few more years.

Oh, and in case your wondering how to solve it. Your only real options as far as I know are to SEO yourself to death to get the geocities crap off the front page of google. Or ignore it.

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