Remember Yahoo Geocities? The online community of websites that turned the Internet into a nice, homey place to visit? Geocities hosted my first few websites back in the ’90s. In 2009,  Yahoo decided to put an end to Geocities. Hundreds of thousands of websites were suddenly offline, mine included. Of course we were warned far in advance that Geocities was closing down. Most of the members simply saved their pages, leaving the originals online until they were gone with the rest of Geocities. That’s what we thought happened. It turns out the Geocities isn’t really dead, it’s just different and in the hands of someone else. How did this happen? Let me tell you.

At least three sites backed up some or all of the Geocities site before it went offline. This is relatively easy to do and I’m surprised that Yahoo didn’t prevent this from happening. In retrospect, it makes perfect sense to steal all the sites and then market them as your own. It makes perfect sense to a thief, that is. Here are the sites that I know have backed up some or all of the old Geocities website:

1. http://www.archive.org/ has backed up almost the whole Internet, at some point or other. If you had a website at some point in the past, IA has probably archived one or more iterations of it.

2. http://reocities.com/ has also sucked up some or all of the Geocities pages and offers them up from their site. As far as I can tell, reocities doesn’t have advertising on the site. If you find an ad, let me know and I will change this. I don’t have a problem with these guys or with IA. They aren’t making money from the copyrighted material that had been on the old Geocities site.

3. http://www.oocities.org/ is a different story completely. The first clue would be the .org domain name. You’d think this site would be full of generous people helping other folks out, wouldn’t you? You’d be wrong. What you really have is a site that has stolen all of the old Geocities sites and monetized them. Flashy ads show up on every page except the main page of the site. Why is this? I suspect that it’s to give you the impression that these people are doing us all a favor by keeping the Geocities sites alive.

You know what’s worse than putting the ads on other people’s copyrighted material? The fact that it would be very, very easy for the owner(s) to scan the site and collect all of the email addresses. In the blink of an eye these guys could notify the actual owners of the original sites that oocities.org is using their material. Did they do this? Nope. They hide behind the general goodwill of the Internet, allowing the site to be crawled by search engines but not trying to contact any of the original owners.

On the Geocities site, each site owner was able to do two things. First, they could access their own pages and edit them as they see fit. Second, they could pay a fee each month which would remove the ads from their pages. That way they would either put up their own ads or simply maintain an ad-free site. Geocities had terms of service for everything and, overall, it was a very well-run company. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same thing about oocities.org. They pretend to be doing the world a favor but, in fact, they are making money off of someone’s copyrighted work.

If you had a Geocities page in the past, check to see if it’s being used by oocities.org. Contrary to their FAQ, your page isn’t ‘removed within hours’ after you contact them to take your stuff down. It takes at least two days. Reocities will also remove your pages. They have set up an online form for that. I would hope that, like me, you’d be a bit ticked off that your very own material is being used by someone else. Theft of this kind is disturbing, to say the least.

Thanks for reading!