The Making of ReoCities, 600K accounts recovered already and counting
reocities.com
reocities.com
http://www.reocities.com/Area51/1997/rants/oj.htm
How could I have known OJ was involved with covering up the moon landing hoax without geocites? I forgot how much fun random readings of goecites could be.
I'm partying like its 1999. Thanks so much for this effort! The epic struggle to save the cities was fascinating. Geek-heroism at its finest.
Jason Kottke blogged about geocities going down:
http://kottke.org/09/10/walter-millers-home-page
Then someone told him the page was up at reocities and he linked to it, but lamented that one of his favorite pages wasn't up, 'cartoon girls I wanna nail'.
So I got an email from one of his 'fans' if I could restore that page pronto, so I did and mailed him :)
OJ was in Capricorn One, which many of the moon hoax nuts think is a documentary about how NASA did it.
So it makes sense to think that they'd think he'd be involved in the coverup.
If geocities was eating that much of their bandwidth (which I doubt), couldn't they advertise on it?
I just don't understand how a few geeks can like this enough to buy (or scavenge from their closet) the necessary equipment to do a project like this, but a multi-billion-dollar technology powerhouse like Yahoo! cannot.
I'm not saying GeoCities couldn't make money, but you have to remember that there is a bureaucracy charge for every big company that wants to maintain software. If there is a developer on the project, there has to be a manager. If there's a manager on the project, there will be reporting requirements. If there are reporting requirements, there must be an analyst, etc.
It's easy for me to see Yahoo considering this not worth their time; I don't think there were any nefarious intentions at all.
But to me that smacks of bait-and-switch, if you buy up an advertising supported hosting service you should not change the basic business model that made it a success.
Way (way) back in the day when geocities and angelfire were the only free ways to have a website they kept putting ads on peoples pages.
This led to a bunch of different scripts and hacks being created that would hide the ads. There then seemed to be an ongoing battle between the hackers and site devs on how to insert html code that couldn't be hidden via JS/CSS/HTML
For Yahoo to state that they'd be keeping an archive of geocities up, there would be legal issues about what kind of guarantees they're giving, legal state of the sign-up 'contract' that people entered into when they started their geocities page, legal requirements for proving someone is who they say they are when they suddenly say 'hey, delete my page I created in 1997, btw, I moved 8 times and changed my name 3 times', how that all fits in with EU data protection laws, etc etc.
Geeks doing it makes it a 'fun project', with no expectation of those legal issues (not that some of them don't exist still). If it vanishes overnight, it's a loss of something that wasn't guaranteed,
For an individual to do something is a different endevour from a large corporation doing something, and in this case, the financial burden of keeping a read-only archive of geocities might have been too much for yahoo.
Or perhaps they never even contemplated it :)
The plan is to give people control again, but that's not a very easy problem. A number of solutions have already been suggested though, and I think that's something that can be dealt with.
Obviously, if someone does not want their content on there I'll remove it immediately, as far as I'm concerned I'm just hosting it.
And yes, of course the authors have the copyright to their pages, that's an inalienable right.
So far though, the only things I've received to that effect are people that are actively contributing their content, nobody has asked to have it removed. (And the number of 'contributors' is quite significant already (50+)).
(Saying "no" to this question isn't a bad thing! Sometimes the most interesting projects are a result of doing something because it's possible, and thinking about what that means later.)
Then to couple the content to user accounts and to give a modicum of control back to the real owners of the content.
After that there are two possible avenues, the first one is a site where no new accounts are accepted and you can only remove or update files that are already there (mostly to save people from embarrassment).
The second option would be to open up new account creation, but that's a different kettle of fish. It would require some major development in terms of spam and abuse control and dealing with that. We have some of that for ww.com (nsfw, most of the times it is, but you never know if some 'jerk' is being an ass), so we can use that or expand it.
My first thought would be to identify a number of users as neighborhood cops.
I'm sure that will be a workable solution, but we're still a ways away from that.
The next big milestone will be complete coverage, after that we will move to more functionality.
Webcounters, webrings and so on will all be restored as far as possible.
Consider letters from the Civil War. Publishing them a few years after the war would have been a gross violation of someone's privacy. But now they are an invaluable primary source historians have for understanding the era.
GeoCities was the web in its infancy. We know what that was like because we remember it, even took part in it. People in 100 years will want insight into that time period as well.
I'm something of a data packrat anyway, so I probably would just move them out of sight, but a mechanism to restore the pages in time would be good.
Thank you!
Put this site in your will for your descendants :) (You have any kids?)
Also remember you can make your DMCA requirements as hard as possible.
-Your name, address, phone # and email address;
-Location of your content on our site
-your electronic or physical signature or the electronic or physical signature of the person authorized to act on your behalf;
-a statement made by you under penalty of perjury, that the information in your notice is accurate, that you are the copyright owner or authorized to act on the copyright owner’s behalfNow we're going to merge both sets, for technical reasons (they need their data in a specific 'full headers' format) I'll be on the receiving end, then later archive.org will recrawl all of reocities.
Then there is 'textfiles', they also did a crawl and we will share data as well.
In the end we should be able to recover pretty much all of it, including the international sites.
Let me return the favor there ;)
I don't claim copyright over anything but the http://reocities.com/ and http://reocities.com/newhome/makingof.html pages at this point, all the rest is owned by the respective users.
The funny thing is though, that was my question before doing this, and I figured it's better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission, first let's get it done.
Much to my surprise the only mail I've got so far is people that are literally ecstatic that their pages weren't lost and people that send me their backups for inclusion.
Not a single removal request. Though I'm sure that in time that will happen.
I seem to recall a recent post on another site about this - reddit maybe - about parallel efforts to archive GeoCities, and whether everyone was working together for maximum benefit.
Did you make that post? If you could respond and link to it, I'd appreciate it.
EDIT: Gotta be honest that I don't recall what exactly I'm talking about. Here are a couple reddit links for anyone curious:
The making of Reocities.com - one man's attempt to archive the entire contents of Geocities.com http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/9yne3/the_saving...
The Saving of Geocities, a tale of bandwidth and stress, most if not all Geocities content saved! http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/9yne3/the_saving...
Yes we're pooling resources, good chance that we'll get almost everything.
I didn't figure that you were claiming copyright over any one else's material. I just wasn't sure that removal after the fact was sufficient to avoid legal troubles for "reproducing" their works without permission.
I expect that the vast majority of the content producers will be pleased to see their works live on. I admit to not having checked out the site itself: are you going to provide them means to keep the pages updated, as well? Under similar terms to their Geocities pages.. whatever those were?
In other countries, alone the fact that you are storing the content (without publishing it) is blatant theft.
That being said, a DMCA notice on the site would protect the content provider. The way it works is that if you have a copyright claim against the site, they have a duty to take it down when you inform them. As long as they respect that, they are pretty much covered.