Goddam Yahoo / Geocities

The BBQ Pit
1

Up until last year I had my Disney Shorts website at Geocities. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but as the site grew and grew (it’s a little over 100 meg right now) I kept having to add incremental space until I was paying about $50 a month for server space. I can do better than that, I thought. So, when we started the Teemings site and it turned out that I had 500 meg for only $10 a month, I moved everything over there.

So far, so good.

A year later and the old Geocities site is still up. They haven’t gotten paid for it in over a year and they still keep the freaking thing up! Normally this wouldn’t bother me that much … but search engines still reference the old site! The IMDb won’t let me update my listings there because the old URLs still work! I look like an idiot because I can’t get in to either delete or edit the site anymore, and it’s had a freaking “Happy Holidays” banner on it year round.

Not to mention that the old domain name has been bought up by a porno spammer.

And nothing I can do seems to be able to get them to take it down! I’ve gone through all of the flaming rings on their website. Nothing. I’ve written their copyright department to inform them that it contains major violations of Disney’s copyrights. They don’t care. I finally found another e-mail address today at their billing department and wrote them a little note :

*Dear Gentlemen,

I am writing to this address because it is about the only actual e-mail address I’ve found on this site. I’m hoping that I’m actually writing to a real person and not an automated e-mail bot.

I used to have a site at Geocities at http://www.geocities.com/eutychus55

This acccount was left behind my me when I moved the site onto another server.

I have not paid for this site in over a year, but for some reason it is still up. And I don’t seem to be able to convince anyone at Geocities to take it down. Even after a year of trying through various methods through your site.

Having this site still up is causing me no little personal embarassment and is causing various other search engines not to recognize my new address.

PLEASE!!! By All that is good and holy, remove this site from your server! Check your records … you are not getting paid for it anymore, and the fact that I’m having such EXTREME difficulty getting it taken down is not causing
me to have any goodwill towards Yahoo/Geocties or to communicate such goodwill to my fellow webmasters.

Thank you,

Patrick Malone*

TAKE IT DOWN, DAMN YOU!!!

2

Can you still access your Yahoo email?

If you can, track down a list of a couple thousand email addresses, and hit them with porn spam pointing to the site.

That should do it.

3

First off, what host charges $10 for 100 megs? I just updated my domain at softcomca.com to $15 a month, for 75 megs. (I’m up to almot 50 megs, and I was feeling the pinch.)

Not that I want to switch from softcom.ca. They have doen fine by me. But I’m ALWAYS in the market for a new domain host. (I’m pathetic. Some people collect beanie babies, I collect domains!)

But getting to your rant: Yikes. That is extraordinarily irritating! I can’t figure out what else you should do, though black455’s suggestion might work! :wink:

I have a less extreme (but still annoying) problem (not that I’ve done much about it yet). I had my portrait drawing site up with an old ISP I long since ditched. Switched the portrait site to another host. Yet they still keep my portrait site up at the old host, and it still shows up in search engines, etc. Fortunately, I did manage to put a “I’m moving” link on the main page only, but that isn’t good enough. If someone comes into the site from any other page, they don’t get redirected. And that sucks.

4

You know, I’ve always pronounced Geocities as gee - AW -cities. Rhymes with “atrocities,” you know. :smiley:

5

yosemitebabe, mine’s $10/month for 500 meg.

6

My host is $9.99 for 300MB, or $16.50 for 500.

7

That’s the same one I’m using now, Daowajan. It’s a good service and a fairly fast server. The e-mail’s down more than I’d prefer, but I don’t use the e-mail that much anyway.

8

Euty, why don’t you just inform Disney that there’s a page using THEIR copyrighted images without permission? They love to threaten lawsuits at the slightest provocation.

And Disney shorts are better than Looney Tunes how?

9

If it’s your site…You can put anything on the site that you want, yes? Despite the fact you’re not paying for it?

Why don’t you delete everything off the offending site except for “GeoCities sucks. Click here for the REAL Disney Short Site.” Or something.

[sub]Ducks and covers in anticipation of being called an idiot.[/sub]

10

Bossk … because the idea that Disney files lawsuits at the drop of a hat is a paranoid UL. I know that Disney is aware of my site because the executive producer of Mickey Mouse Works has posted on my message board quite a few times and has actually provided stuff for the site.

chique … the problem is that since my membership in geocities expired, I can get to the site anymore to do anything with it. It would be easy to do a redirect to the new site, but I can’t even do that much and it just sits there like a sore thumb.

11

Hmm, somethingawful.com has had many geocities sites shut down by posting links to them as an Awful Link of the Day - this leads to a few thousand SA regulars going to the site, which eats up so much bandwidth that the provider takes them down. Maybe if you made a post (moderator hat off, of course) asking everyone here at the forums to go to your site a few times a day they would take it down.

12

How about opening an anonymous webmail account and complaining about unspecified copyrighted material or something else that contravenes the GeoCities AUP (well, child porn would be taking a bit far, but…)? See if GeoCities jump rather than risk a lawsuit.

13

My prediction: instead of pulling your site down, they’ll bill you for the time your site has been up since supposedly cancelling.