This site here was my second careful step into web presence, after www.wyp.net has been shut down over night, and all my pages were lost. I opened my first GeoCities home page at Athens/6324 and Athens/6373 on July 31st, 1996 - four eleven years ago today.

ELEVEN years!!! Times did change since then. So has my home page.
And so has GeoCities - unfortnately.

I really felt at home within GeoCities back then and did a lot trying to contribute to the community.

I translated the GC WorldReport into German for almost 2 years. I became Community Leader in Athens one week before my second anniversary on this site, and enjoyed being part of that friendly bunch of helpers. I met a lot of people, some of which I am still in contact with. And I joined several teams and projects - eager to yet improve the apperance and the positive experience with GeoCities.

I was trained as Topic Master and CL Mentor, I was in the GC International Team (GCIT, ITGC), The Heartland International Team, The Athens International Team, The GC Betatesting Team (yes, GeoCities did have this as a secret team!), The Athens CivicCenter, The Athens CL Welcome Team, and many more I don't even remember.
A German online magazine (@ Online Today) even featured me and the CLs I worked with in an article about GeoCities.
And this is wehere the disappointment starts.

Only 4 hours after the magazine hit the counters nationwide, we had scans of all pages and English translations running online.
Only once, only this one time, we - the German CLs - would have loved to be featured in the GCWR or on the page "GeoCitizens in the news". We all, four of us, sent several requests to the people concerned with these pages. And after one month of waiting we were told that it would be too late - the magazine would have been published too long ago.
We still believe it was more because we were not Americans. GeoCities always was very biased and focused almost 99% on the United States.
Well, O.K., one can live with that. But then came the GeoAvenues and the TopicMastering and all that stuff. Everything should change. Nothing worked. The PageBuilder and other tools were crappy, and we had to face the complaining homesteaders in help chat, mails and forums. But no one of the GeoOfficials could ever tell us more than "things will be better, soon".

For then GeoCities hit the stocks, and all CLs had been awarded ten GeoStocks. This was the only reward I ever received. (Although it was quite problematic for a German resident to actually GET the money out of these stocks...). And the success of the GCTY stocks attracted the predators. And after some months of not knowing exactly what would happen, Yahoo! bought GeoCities.
From that day on, everything deteriorated.

Communications with the GeoOfficials became less and less, our "duties", "responsibiliteis" and "rights" were cut down. And then, finally, last December, the whole CL program was canceled, while we all were waiting how "THEY" would restructure it.

There's nothing left from that old community spirit. Commerce and automatization have moved in. The old Neighborhoods, once the backbone of GeoCities, creating the famous community and atmosphere for which GeoCities has become known in the 'net, all that has gone.

Yahoo! bought GeoCities. Sucked out everything they could possibly derive profit from, and dropped the rest.
Well, look what has become of the flourishing community that once called itself "your home on the web" !

Now, it has become even worse. Two years ago, I registered a virtual domain trough GeoCities and NameSecure. (www.wohlgemuth.org). When I started my own web server, I wanted to take over that domain. So I waited until it needed to be re-registered, and tried to have it moved. NameSecure replied that Yahoo! had taken over control and technical responsibility for that domain. So I contacted them in March 2000. Now, 4 and a half months later, they still did not reply. So I have a registered domain that is not working any longer, and I can't use it because Yahoo! seems to ignore me...

I am plainly disappointed by the way Yahoo! treated me. This is why I removed almost all of my pages from YahooCities.

Sorry to leave, but I'd rather pay for my online presence than to remain with a service that doesn't deserve that name...