

The Making of ReoCities, 600K accounts recovered already and counting - jacquesm
http://www.reocities.com/newhome/makingof.html

======
noonespecial
A few random clicks brought me this:

<http://www.reocities.com/Area51/1997/rants/oj.htm>

How could I have known OJ was involved with covering up the moon landing hoax
without geocites? I forgot how much fun random readings of goecites could be.

I'm partying like its 1999. Thanks so much for this effort! The epic struggle
to save the cities was fascinating. Geek-heroism at its finest.

~~~
jacquesm
My favorite so far was this:

Jason Kottke blogged about geocities going down:

<http://kottke.org/09/10/walter-millers-home-page>

Then someone told him the page was up at reocities and he linked to it, but
lamented that one of his favorite pages wasn't up, 'cartoon girls I wanna
nail'.

So I got an email from one of his 'fans' if I could restore that page pronto,
so I did and mailed him :)

<http://www.reocities.com/TelevisionCity/1356/cartoon2.htm>

------
zandorg
Sell Reocities to AOL for $6 billion!

~~~
silkodyssey
You never know! This may be a good opportunity to launch a startup. Some users
may be interested in maintaining their sites so maybe tools can offered to
help them in that regard. The work done so far is commendable and there is
more work yet to be done. It would be a shame if all the work goes unrewarded!

~~~
zandorg
If someone could guarantee say 100 years of webpage hosting and uptime, for a
cheap fixed one-time cost, I think they could make a lot of money AND stop the
massive page-drain of the Web today.

~~~
pmjordan
It's interesting - hosting/bandwidth costs should decrease more or less
exponentially over time. (after correcting for inflation) That fixed fee
should therefore be substantially less than 100 * (hosting for a year).

~~~
philwelch
It would be anyway because of time value of money.

------
blhack
Could somebody explain how it makes sense for a few nerds to do this, but it
does not for yahoo?

If geocities was eating _that_ much of their bandwidth (which I doubt),
couldn't they advertise on it?

I just don't understand how a few geeks can like this enough to buy (or
scavenge from their closet) the necessary equipment to do a project like this,
but a multi-billion-dollar technology powerhouse like Yahoo! cannot.

~~~
jacquesm
My own guess is that they wanted to push the millions of GeoCities users to
become customers for Y!s paid hosting service.

But to me that smacks of bait-and-switch, if you buy up an advertising
supported hosting service you should not change the basic business model that
made it a success.

~~~
axod
I agree, but markets do change. What was a successful business model in 2000
may not be viable in 2009.

~~~
jacquesm
Bandwidth costs are actually a small fraction of what they were back then, it
should be easier today.

------
jacquesm
<http://mashable.com/2009/10/28/reocities/>

<http://twitter.com/#search?q=reocities>

:)

------
ericb
Neat project, but some things I am wondering... What do you mean by recovering
an account? I assume you don't have the password? Will people have control
over their old content? Is this legal--don't the authors own the copyright of
their pages?

~~~
jacquesm
No, I don't have the password.

The plan is to give people control again, but that's not a very easy problem.
A number of solutions have already been suggested though, and I think that's
something that can be dealt with.

Obviously, if someone does not want their content on there I'll remove it
immediately, as far as I'm concerned I'm just hosting it.

And yes, of course the authors have the copyright to their pages, that's an
inalienable right.

So far though, the only things I've received to that effect are people that
are actively contributing their content, nobody has asked to have it removed.
(And the number of 'contributors' is quite significant already (50+)).

~~~
scott_s
Have you considered the ramifications of becoming a replacement for GeoCities,
as opposed to just an archive of it?

(Saying "no" to this question isn't a bad thing! Sometimes the most
interesting projects are a result of doing something because it's possible,
and thinking about what that means later.)

~~~
jacquesm
Yes, I did. Not rigorously but sort of back-of-the-envelope. But I'll deal
with that when the requests come in, the first stop for me now is to get
complete coverage.

Then to couple the content to user accounts and to give a modicum of control
back to the real owners of the content.

After that there are two possible avenues, the first one is a site where no
new accounts are accepted and you can only remove or update files that are
already there (mostly to save people from embarrassment).

The second option would be to open up new account creation, but that's a
different kettle of fish. It would require some major development in terms of
spam and abuse control and dealing with that. We have some of that for ww.com
(nsfw, most of the times it is, but you never know if some 'jerk' is being an
ass), so we can use that or expand it.

My first thought would be to identify a number of users as neighborhood cops.

I'm sure that will be a workable solution, but we're still a ways away from
that.

The next big milestone will be complete coverage, after that we will move to
more functionality.

Webcounters, webrings and so on will all be restored as far as possible.

~~~
scott_s
A suggestion: if people request removal, of course remove it from the public-
facing archive, but don't completely delete their pages. Keep everything
around as a private archive until it's appropriate to release publicly.

Consider letters from the Civil War. Publishing them a few years after the war
would have been a gross violation of someone's privacy. But now they are an
invaluable primary source historians have for understanding the era.

GeoCities was the web in its infancy. We know what that was like because we
remember it, even took part in it. People in 100 years will want insight into
that time period as well.

~~~
jacquesm
Like a 20 year embargo or so, that's an excellent idea!

I'm something of a data packrat anyway, so I probably would just move them out
of sight, but a mechanism to restore the pages in time would be good.

Thank you!

~~~
ars
20 is probably not enough. It would need to be closer to 100 years both
because of copyright law, and to make sure the owners are no longer alive.

Put this site in your will for your descendants :) (You have any kids?)

~~~
jacquesm
Yes, one

------
vaksel
You should make the DMCA policy linked on your front page. That's the safest
way to avoid legal troubles.

Also remember you can make your DMCA requirements as hard as possible.

    
    
       -Your name, address, phone # and email address;
       -Location of your content on our site
       -your electronic or physical signature or the electronic or physical signature of the person authorized to act on your behalf;
       -a statement made by you under penalty of perjury, that the information in your notice is accurate, that you are the copyright owner or authorized to act on the copyright owner’s behalf

~~~
jacquesm
The DMCA does not apply to this site.

------
johns
Can you tell me if there are any in the SiliconValley neighborhood with the
address of 7771? I don't know if I ever deleted it, but I don't remember the
exact subneighborhood.

~~~
jacquesm
it's not in the set that has been restored so far, but I haven't even
scratched the surface yet. I've made a note and if it comes up I'll drop you
an email.

~~~
johns
Awesome. Thanks!

------
ramchip
Makes me feel nostalgic for this Angelfire Sonic fansite I had when I was
younger. I didn't find my page (probably dead), but here's a delicious piece
of retro I did see:

<http://www.angelfire.com/sk/sonicknuckles/>

------
perplexes
This is wonderful. My friends and I made a few sites on there, but I can't
remember where. Mine and another friend's were in SiliconValley, I remember
that much. Thank you, thank you!

------
brown9-2
Has anyone from Yahoo or Geocities contacted you, officially or unofficially?
I'd imagine there must be some worker bees within the organization who were
glad to see you doing this.

------
sganesh
Excellent !!

------
geuis
@jacquesm have you thought about eventually sharing the recovered data with
Archive.org?

~~~
jacquesm
Yes, absolutely, we've been going back and forth during the last days of the
crawl and sharing seed lists, they had plenty I didn't have and vv.

Now we're going to merge both sets, for technical reasons (they need their
data in a specific 'full headers' format) I'll be on the receiving end, then
later archive.org will recrawl all of reocities.

Then there is 'textfiles', they also did a crawl and we will share data as
well.

In the end we should be able to recover pretty much all of it, including the
international sites.

------
chasingsparks
s/icon/iconic/

~~~
jacquesm
Fixed, thanks ! There isn't a day that I still learn something about
English... sigh...

~~~
chasingsparks
Your welcome. This is one of my favorite parts of HN: built in error
correction.

~~~
jacquesm
hehe, _You're_ welcome.

Let me return the favor there ;)

~~~
chasingsparks
HAH! Stellar.

------
dtby
I'm curious as to how you are dealing with potential copyright issues. (Or,
for that matter, how archive.org and the like approach these problems.)

~~~
jacquesm
The same as everybody else, simply ask to have your stuff removed and it will
be done, easy as that.

I don't claim copyright over anything but the <http://reocities.com/> and
<http://reocities.com/newhome/makingof.html> pages at this point, all the rest
is owned by the respective users.

The funny thing is though, that was my question before doing this, and I
figured it's better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission, first
let's get it done.

Much to my surprise the only mail I've got so far is people that are literally
ecstatic that their pages weren't lost and people that send me _their_ backups
for inclusion.

Not a single removal request. Though I'm sure that in time that will happen.

~~~
dtby
Excellent. I wish you well, of course. I'm not a guy who personally believes
in intellectual property, so I wasn't trying to cast any aspersions on your
project.

I didn't figure that you were claiming copyright over any one else's material.
I just wasn't sure that removal after the fact was sufficient to avoid legal
troubles for "reproducing" their works without permission.

I expect that the vast majority of the content producers will be pleased to
see their works live on. I admit to not having checked out the site itself:
are you going to provide them means to keep the pages updated, as well? Under
similar terms to their Geocities pages.. whatever those were?

~~~
anApple
It depends on what country you reside. In the USA, UK, Israel etc, you have a
fair use clause and you might be allowed of doing it.

In other countries, alone the fact that you are storing the content (without
publishing it) is blatant theft.

~~~
alain94040
It's highly unlikely that fair use would apply here, since the amount of
copied work is 100% of the original. This is not using a small excerpt for
edudcation purposes...

That being said, a DMCA notice on the site would protect the content provider.
The way it works is that if you have a copyright claim against the site, they
have a duty to take it down when you inform them. As long as they respect
that, they are pretty much covered.

