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!!!