Panic in the Virtual Streets: Thousands of fannish websites vanish overnight
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| Title: | Panic in the Virtual Streets: Thousands of fannish websites vanish overnight |
| Creator: | Joanne Madge |
| Date(s): | April 2001 |
| Medium: | |
| Fandom: | |
| Topic: | Tripod Massacre |
| External Links: | Tarriel Cell v.14 n.4, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Panic in the Virtual Streets: Thousands of fannish websites vanish overnight is a 2001 article by Joanne Madge.
It was printed in Tarriel Cell v.14 n.4.
The subject was the Tripod Massacre.
Excerpts
Sometime in the late afternoon of Friday, March 16th, members of hundreds of various fandoms got an unpleasant shock when they tried to visit some of their favorite web sites hosted by free Internet space provider, Tripod. The pages were gone, vanished without a trace, with nothing but a generic "404 Error Not Found" page left in their places. By Saturday morning, online chats and message boards (hosted on non-Tripod servers) were abuzz with agitated cries of "Where has my page gone?" The creators of the missing sites had been given no warning and no explanation was offered by Tripod.
E-mails enquiring [sic] about the vanished sites were either ignored or answered with a curt generic message pointing out that Tripod's Terms of Service "TOS" agreement states that any page can be removed from their servers for any reason, with no explanation... and that was that.
By Saturday afternoon, rumors and theories were flying fast and furious. A few fans pointed to brand new Internet copyright laws being considered in several countries, and (specialty a new "Digital Agenda Art" passed in Australia in December 2000 which other countries reportedly plan to copy). They stated that the Act placed the responsibility of online copyright infringement on the web space providers and not just the creator of the offending web sites hosted on that space (in actuality, the Act clearly states that "Internet Service Providers are not liable for infringing material communicated via their facilities, unless they have control over the content of the material - eg if they administer the website themselves"). The panicked fans conjectured that fear of being sued had possibly moved Tripod to eradicate all potentially copyright-infringing fan sites' - and that surely other space providers would soon be following suit. The-End-of-the-Internet-As-We-Know-It was finally upon us.
By Saturday evening, a "Ban Tripod" movement - complete with its own website and logo (that others were encouraged to copy and display on their own sites) - was organized, protesting the shoddy treatment of the fan sites, as well as the lack of warning so that the site creators could have at least had the chance to back up their pages before they were destroyed. Other web savvy fans pointed out google.coms archiving feature that stores all websites listed on its vast search engine. If you were fortunate enough to be listed, you could copy your page from their archive for several days after your site had vanished from Tripod's servers.
On Sunday morning, alternative theories were showing up on the message boards. Some fans discovered from their own research that Lycos - the company that owns Tripod - has recently been experiencing financial difficulties. Perhaps they were getting rid of their freebie services in favor of opening up more space to those willing to pay for their 'upgraded' web hosting services. Exploring tripod.com itself certainty seemed to support this theory. Searching through their website categories like "Auto", or "Finance" brought up mostly whole, undamaged sites, while the "Entertainment" section (made up mostly of freebie, fan-run sites) listed broken link after broken link. Even pages listed as Tripod "Super Member Sites" in that section had been eradicated.
However, in the end, none of these theories turned out to be the actual case. On Monday morning, Tripod began sending out e-mails to its offended members explaining that some software they'd left running over the weekend, designed to sniff-out pages that did not contain "integrity of content: (whatever that's supposed to mean) and automatically erase... [the pdf of this article cuts off here... :(]