OoCities - FAQ (revised in March 2012) - click on a Question to get an answer.
"I am a former GeoCities author......Thanks for saveing my old GeoCities page but I would like to update it daily. How?"
For now, we are providing rather an archive and we are not able to give access to our servers for most active sites. But we will be glad to send you your files to enable you to upload and update them somewhere else and to make them available to a bigger audience than here.
...I would like to update a single issue on my old GeoCities page."
Write an email to OoCities {AT} gmail {DOT} com and we will manually work this out. Simply include your updated files or lines of html.
...I dont want my old GeoCities page to stay online. Why did you archive it at all?"
How to remove it:
We fully respect you copyright and will of course remove your interlectual property from the internet at our earliest convience. Just write a mail to oocities {AT} gmail {DOT} com and it will be gone within 14 days but often within hours. Note: (Preferably) use your original email which was stated on your page to verify that you are the owner. Don't forget to ask us to send you the files before we take the page offline, otherwise the files might be lost. When does a page disappear from Google search results? Google updates the search results and cache for most oocities pages every few weeks (raw estimation) in urgent cases tell us to notify google, which can speed up this process. This following URL helps to speed up the removal from the google results and cache but only when we already modified or removed the content source at ours - try http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals - (just dont waste time with it before we did the modification at the source.) Why we archived your page at all: OoCities took action to keep all these pages stay online assumeing to be a service serving the public interesst. In many cases, the owners were happy that we have kept their pages online. If they wanted them offline before they would probably already have taken them offline at GeoCities before October 2009. As it applys for all proper archived contents all are archived execatly like they were between 20 and 27 october 2009 without any manipulation. (if in some cases a page looks distorted thats because some picture files are accidentally missing or removed due to inappropriate content or copyright material) Basic questions:"What exactly was GeoCities.com?"
GeoCities.com was the first free Web Host, hosting millions of small webpages since 1994.
In 1999 it was bought by Yahoo and closed in 2009.
GeoCities can also be seen as the predecessor of myspace and facebook.
With GeoCities.com, the world also lost millions of pieces of unique content which could have been saved easily.
The authors were informed but many did not even notice it. Thus many did not agree in the deletion of their work.
For further Information read our main page OoCities.com or
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoCities.com
"What exactly is OoCities.com?"
OoCities.com tried to save many GeoCities.com pages during the last days they were online from 20 to 27 October 2009.
As we did not have much time and only a very small budget we were "only" able save a share of around 2 Million pages.
OoCities especially tried to perserve all those pages which are unique scientific sources like those which are referenced by Wikipedia.
"Does OoCities.com cooperate with 'Yahoo! GeoCities'?"
OoCities.com is no way affiliated with 'Yahoo! GeoCities'.
More about OoCities.com and its future:"How does OoCities.com get rid of any spam, malware and copyright/DMCA infrigment material ?"
Thats one of the most striking issues referring to any provider or Web service which distributes user-generated content.
As we aren't the originator of any of the pages, we can't possibly know every single one nor be responsible for them (OCILLA §512c).
In the case of OoCities.com, this issue seems at least easier to manage than in most others as our content does rarely change because we have only a few active members.
Thus once all inapprotiate contents are removed, the OoCities.com contents will keep their quality.
Furthermore, as all pages were already online since up to 15 years its reasonable to assume that most pages are fine.
Anyhow, our highest priority is to maintain absolutly clean colletion of information and we think the stated above i not enough. As long as there are any spam pages left we will try to remove them all.
Yet, with the help of automated filters as well as volunteers to look through pages manually. While there were hardly any copyright infrigments or malware, we could already detect and remove 18.000 spam pages and inappropriate contents (0.9% out of around 2 Million pages in total) but there are probably a few left which should better be removed.
In case you find any please take your chance to improve the internet a little bit and click the "report"-button on the certain page or notice us at oocities {AT} gmail {DOT} com. "Who pays the OoCities.com Servers?"
OoCities.com displays a content-related ad within a seperated frame/box next to many pages just like it was before on GeoCities, which every page owner agreed with.
Using money from these ads, we hope to be able to pay for our servers in the future but before the ads the OoCities servers had to be fully paid for by volunteer supporters. Now its still not reasonable to expect that OoCities.com will ever earn more than the servers cost and we still hope for further supporters to make sure to stay available for an infinite amount of time and preferable without beeing tied to these Ads. Should OoCities.com earn more on its own we will either proportionally cut back the ads to a minimum or support a generally accepted charitable cause.
Also contact us if you want to advertise your charitable cause for free. If you don't like the ads on your or other certain pages, send us an e-mail and we will disable them. Among others OoCities is free of ads for all visitors who are directed to us by Wikipedia to meet consensus with Wikipedia's regulations and the ad free nature of Wikipedia. Please send any further questions,feedback or suggestions to oocities[at]gmail[dot]com |