This column is about TANSTAAFL, which is a term from a book by Robert A. Heinlein (one of the best Science Fiction authors that ever lived) called "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress". The term means "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch". This concept is the basis of the plot of the book, which is about a Lunar penal colony and it's attempt to free itself from Earth domination.
Recently, webring owners (known as ringmasters) noticed a small problem with their webrings. In case you do not remember, webrings are a site promotion technique which allows pages or sites of a similar theme (defined by the ringmaster) to be linked together. A special set of code called a "ring fragment" is added to each page in the ring to allow navigation from site to site. These are called rings because if you continue surfing through the ring you will eventually come back to the site from which you started.
Anyway, on older style rings (webrings which were created before Yahoo destroyed, uh, simplified, the system the HTML fragment was often gorgeous and contained one or more graphics. Since the webring system did not allow graphics to be stored with the fragment, the graphics were either stored locally to each site, or they were stored in a place common to all sites. This was often the ringmasters main site.
Well, free hosts such as Geocities make their money from the banner advertisements shown at the top (or side or bottom) of each page. Displaying a graphic in a ring fragment does not generate any income.
Thus, Geocities (now owned by Yahoo) decided to change their servers to block any and all remote accesses to graphic images. The webring owners were not the only ones who were inconvenienced by this change, however. They were just one of the first groups of people to notice.
Another huge group of people who where immediately (and far more seriously) inconvenienced was guestbook owners and signers. You see, it's common for people to sign guestbooks and leave graphics images as presents. Since guestbooks do not allow for storage of graphics locally, it is very common for people to store them on their own websites.
Unfortunately, many people stored those guestbook graphics on their Geocities website. Thus, when Geocities pulled the plug on remote image loading, all of those wonderful images in guestbooks became filled with a blank space.
What is the worst problem with all of this? While the webring owners can generally edit their pages to load the images locally, guestbook owners usually have no such recourse. Very few of the free guestbooks (none that I know of) allow the entries to be edited once they are posted. Even if they did, it would often be a huge, labor intensive task to make the necessary changes. Thus, we are left with permanently ugly guestbooks.
Did Geocities do something wrong? Well, according to their terms and conditions everything that they have done is perfectly okay. In fact, Geocities would claim that those who remotely linked images were violating the terms and conditions of creating a Geocities website. However, one could argue that if you don't enforce something it becomes null and void. I have wondered what would happen if Geocities webmasters filed a class action suit against that company? I know in the workplace, at least, if you have company policies on the books but you do not enforce them or have practices that run counter to the written words, then the policy does not legally exist.
This is not the first time this has happened, by the way. Other free hosts such as Angelfire and Xoom (now NBCI) did exactly the same thing within the last year, and produced exactly the same results.
What's the answer? My recommendation, as always, is to pay for your site. Paid hosts such as addr.com offer fast, efficient web sites for under $10 a month (less than a pizza for lunch). Since you are directly paying for the bandwidth, you can do whatever you want with it. Thus, you can remote link to guestbooks and webrings and anything else that your heart desires.
The shame of it all is now, thanks to these free hosts, the web is permanently left with the ugly scars of their efforts to make money at the expense of their users. Is this wrong? In my humble opinion, these free hosts have known about this practice for years, and to just start enforcing this kind of thing now is unethical and hostile towards their users.
You have to remember that hosts such as Geocities, Yahoo, Xoom, Angelfire and others have no loyalty to their user base. You see, their customers are not their users. Their customers are advertisers, and that is where the money is. Web site owners are just another commodity ... should we be surprised that we are treated the same as one would treat a slaughterhouse cow or a sack full of potatoes?
Unless otherwise noted, all photos and text is Copyright © Richard G Lowe, Jr.