

BBC To Delete 172 Websites Due to Budget Cuts, Geek Saves Them for $3.99 - rmah
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/bbc_to_delete_172_websites_due_to_budget_cuts_geek.php

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bena
Horrible reporting.

The cost to the BBC to keep those pages on its servers is more than $3.99.
Just because one guy downloaded all of the pages, compressed them, and then
seeded them on bittorrent for a cost of $3.99 to him doesn't mean jack.

Notice that he's not hosting the content in any easily readable form. No, he
decided to put that burden on everyone by putting it up on bittorrent. Why
isn't he hosting the content? Because hosting a heavily trafficked site ain't
cheap.

~~~
makmanalp
The fact that it'd cost the BBC millions to maintain those pages means jack.

People were going to lose access to that information, and now they aren't.
That's really all that matters. With torrents, the burden is on "everyone"
only if they really want to keep it up.

edit: Reasoning for downvotes would be appreciated. The BBC has a long history
of recklessly losing valuable data. See kgtm's link to previous yc post on
this topic.

edit #2: Oh, okay, I see what's going on. When I said "means jack", I didn't
mean to imply that the BBC should spend inordinate amounts to keep the data
up. What I meant was: Yes, it might have cost them to do it, but look, like
what this guy did, there are other ways to keep the data archived. Hell, I'm
sure some people would even settle for a CD archive or something.

~~~
urbanjunkie
"means jack"

Actually it doesn't mean jack. that's my money they'd be using, and from a
quick scan of those websites, i'm happy for them to disappear.

For some reason, many people seem to have decided that all data is important
and there's an almost fetishistic devotion to saving everything that can be
saved. Not all information needs to be preserved for all time.

~~~
cryptoz
> Not all information needs to be preserved for all time.

I disagree, and strongly. Future historians will probably disagree with you
too. Even the most inane TV shows can prove to be extremely valuable when
trying to decipher the culture of various countries 300 or 3000 years in the
past. Imagine reading a trashy romance novel from 1000 BC. You'd learn a lot
about the people who lived in that time.

You might counter this by saying that with all the information out there now,
we only need to keep the "good stuff". But who decides what's good, right now?
How do you know that what you decide is good will always be seen as good? Your
personal opinions on the content disappearing are totally irrelevant when
perhaps millions of people have seen it or have been affected by it.

All information that is created should be saved, especially since we're _able_
to. Imagine the ancient Romans deciding to burn a bunch of books because it
cost too much to hire guards for the library. Ouch.

~~~
Semiapies
Mind, I don't think future historians will weep too much about losing some
promotional websites for such actual content.

~~~
Semiapies
Is the downvote above because someone disagrees, or because the downvoter is
just completely unaware of the nature of the sites being taken down?

Most of these sites are promo fluff for BBC TV shows. Some are cancelled, some
are for news show with little more "content" than "This show next comes on ---
on BBC -".

Most of these sites would be dismissed as "marketing" if the BBC were a for-
profit company. Marketing for defunct products. The rest is material that's
being legitimately archived elsewhere.

~~~
cryptoz
(OT: I didn't downvote you above; in fact, I can't, since you replied to my
comment I think. However, note that many of us frequently accidentally
downvote instead of upvote and can't undo it, especially on mobile touch-
browsers if we're not zoomed-in enough for a big arrow)

~~~
Semiapies
I've occasionally done that myself, but I then post a note that I meant to
upvote.

------
jrwoodruff
I can't believe this passes for reporting. Did anyone contact the BBC for
their estimate of the amount they'll save and how?

Also, just because the info isn't public does not mean the BBC doesn't have it
stored in their own digital archives.

~~~
joeyh
The BBC has stored at least some of if in an archive in cooperation with the
British Library. I've posted a link to an earlier article; you can find it by
browsing some of the "TLDs" they're removing.

(BTW, did anyone notice that the BBC calls these sites "TLDs", and that they
took a beating for that by people who assumed they were incorrectly referring
to "Top Level Domains"? But, TLD can mean "Top Level Directory" too, which is
entirely accurate. Most amusing...)

Anyway, I think it's good that we're developing a culture where some people
care, and make sure that things get archived, even if it's done sometimes
unnecessarily, and almost always only gets a degraded copy (ie, a web rip
without streaming videos, and without structured data). I only hope that these
vigilante actions don't lead companies to _not_ pre-announce massive data
erasures.

------
bugsy
Just a note for those wondering about the content of the archive.

Having downloaded it, it's around 2GB compressed. It contains images, but most
pages are nonfunctional, due to links being specified from the site root /. To
view it properly you need to place the folders at the root of your web server
or of your hard drive.

~~~
weaksauce
That does not really tell me what is in the pages though. What are the 175
sites that would have been foreve lost?

~~~
dotBen
Load the torrent into your client and it will show you the file structure. You
then select the file(s) you want to download.

------
kgtm
_The BBC needs to make visible cuts in places where the British (anti-BBC)
press accuse them of providing services that they believe should be provided
by private companies.If the site doesn't vanish the press wouldn't see it as a
real cut, would they?_ [1]

[1] sambeau, <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2188870>

~~~
sambeau
Well said that man! :)

Also, keeping these sites (without actively updating them, monitoring comments
etc) would essentially cost the BBC nothing, especially the low-traffic ones.
BBC Online is a very lean organisation.

see: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2189564>

------
Semiapies
The BBC makes a show of "cutting costs" by closing down promotional sites for
a pile of mostly-cancelled TV shows and handing off some sites that might
actually count as "content" to the British Library. (Meanwhile, they leave up
stuff like this because people actually watch _Doctor Who_ :
<http://www.badwolf.org.uk>)

 _Why is this a story_ , even in web circles? Why all the hyped-up outrage?

Are people associated with the BBC shilling this?

~~~
iuguy
Not necessarily. But the BBC are. The current UK government has asked all
departments to cut spending by more than ever in history, even more than when
the empire nearly went bankrupt after the napoleonic war. The BBC whilst
nominally independent are funded through a state tax and are a state-owned
chartered corporation. The current tories have always been treated with
hostility by the BBC as the tories tend to want to reduce the BBC's funding,
and the Lib Dems never really got much of a word in edgeways. Consequently the
BBC (with it's massive media power) is pushing this to make it very visible
that they're doing something about cutting costs.

------
v21
The real issue is "Cool URIs don't change" vs "The BBC is hideously bloated".
Keeping these sites online isn't so terribly expensive. Keeping a few hundred
extra lines in your .htaccess isn't expensive. I've not seen a decent estimate
of the cost savings, and as far as I know one doesn't exist. The material is
being archived inside the BBC, as well as in torrents like this one. But the
URLs are being broken, for no reason besides sending a message.

------
chopsueyar
If the BBC is unable to host these sites because of budgetary issues, is the
BBC also unable to pursue copyright infringement of these same sites if a
third party were to set up the site/s in a different country?

~~~
danohuiginn
I could easily imagine one of the problems could be the BBC _not knowing_ what
rights they have to the content. Likely some of it will be stuff they only
have limited rights to; donating it to an external project could plausibly get
them into trouble. And hiring somebody to check the contracts over 172
websites won't be cheap.

------
jsskate
Did any of you actually see the content?

I downloaded one of the sites in the torrent titled Zombies. It's about a
British girl who organizes a community effort to make a Zombie Movie. Sure the
site was ripped but not the video content. Nothing on the page is worth seeing
other than the video. Once the BBC turns off access to that stream the archive
is virtually useless. I'm going to checkout more ripped sites; my gut says
they're probably video heavy too.

~~~
jsskate
I've looked at it a bit more. All the smaller sites are just place holders for
lesser important topics or for streaming BBC shows. Sure the torrent saves
some user comments (not all) and images (not all, some links are broken) but
there's not really a lot of meat since that content is periphery.

I'd say that most of the valuable content is still stored on the BBC servers,
in the DB where it's being served from right now. I'm sure they're going to
repurpose the good stuff if they haven't already. I have an acquaintance who
works in the web department at the CBC. They've implemented a pretty neat CMS
to repurpose their older media to work with their latest site. I can see the
BBC doing the same.

------
awakeasleep
I don't understand is situation, but it sounds like a case of the Government
removing a high visibility public resource as a sort of protest to budget
cuts. Eg: <http://i.imgur.com/Vdk6D.jpg>

Even if that is the case, I'd sure like to see a breakdown of expense when a
cut like this is made.

~~~
semanticist
Almost all of the sites being archived or deleted (yes, archived - the
reporting that these are all up for deletion was overly simplistic and
incorrect) are for programmes or programme strands that are no longer being
broadcast, in some cases for many many years.

From what I've seen reported, the only site of any significance which is being
removed is 'WW2 People's War', which asked people to put their and their
family's personal stories of the second world war into a central archive
(<http://www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar/>). I believe that this was already being
archived by the British Library, so won't be lost.

The overall decision to cut 50% of the 'TLDs' is definitely political, to
placate an administration that's beholden to the Murdoch media empire, but the
choice of which ones to kill seems mostly pragmatic.

------
danohuiginn
Does anybody have a good idea of how much it _does_ cost for a big
organisation to keep this kind of content online?

Intuitively, it seems that the answer should be 'not much' -- perhaps on the
order of a few thousand dollars/year. A couple of servers, bandwidth, and a
sysadmin checking in now and again to apply security patches &c.

But here (also with e.g. yahoo closing geocities), it's argued that the cost
of keeping them up is much, much higher. Where does the expense come from?

------
GBond
Am I missing something? Where is the price of $3.99 derived from? Cost of
creating the spider script? Labor cost of creating the BT seed? This article
say nothing about this.

~~~
kissickas
I think it's the (monthly?) price of the seedbox.

------
mseebach
It's funny, the activist seems to think the deletion is about appeasing
political masters, but in doing this, they actually lend credibility to the
opposite point: Just leaving the pages in places is unlikely to cost the BBC a
lot. Is it possible that the BBC is cutting in the most visible way possible,
in order to make the cuts seem much more extensive and painful than they
actually are in order to scare the government away from further cuts?

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crocowhile
Here's the actual guy who did this. <http://178.63.252.42/>

------
bryanh
I'm sure someone will take the abandoned content, slap it on a server with
some Adsense and call it a day.

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jedsmith
We've graduated from the grammatically-incorrect singular _they_ to _s/he_?
Really?

~~~
JacobAldridge
Worse still, _they_ (being singular where gender is indertiminate, or you seek
to be neutral) is not grammatically-incorrect, and has a long history in the
English language. It's a bit like the split infinitive, which is often
considered to be incorrect but isn't.

The author: they really should have known better than "s/he", to boldy write
for RWW.

Edit: Added a sourcewith examples -
<http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/austheir.html> and the Wikipedia page
seems to have some discussion about it too -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they>

~~~
parenthesis
Should a singular _they_ be used exactly like any other singular pronoun:

    
    
      "I will say of that person: they laughs a lot."
      (Compare: "I will say of that person: she laughs a lot.")
    
      "They is the person you should talk to."
      (Compare: "He is the person you should talk to.")
    

Or should it instead be:

    
    
      "I will say of that person: they laugh a lot."
    
      "They are the person you should talk to."
    

? And why?

~~~
biot
Presumably if you're referring to a specific individual, you already know the
gender so using "they" in that situation would appear to be incorrect.

However, in the general sense I would argue that the conjugation of verbs
follows a pattern but that pattern doesn't have to be singular vs. plural.
Given "he has" or "she has" one might expect a singular "they" to follow the
pattern "they has". However, "I" is singular yet it uses "I have", so it's not
unexpected for the singular "they" to use "they have". In other words, the
conjugation of "they" is the same regardless of whether it's singular or
plural.

~~~
jonbro
they is used in a bunch of situations where the person prefers to be non
gender specific. It only feels wrong for the first little bit, but hang out
with enough people that have complex gender identities and you will get used
to it.

------
rorrr
It's not the hosting that costs much usually, it's developers + editors +
managers + their managers. It all adds up very quickly.

~~~
mgkimsal
How much do you pay editors and managers and developers to keep 12 year old
sites sitting on a webserver?

