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[Advertising & Cookies] 10 Reasons to Rethink GeoCities!Disclaimer: I don't think that I'm unfairly bashing GeoCities on this page, rather, I'm just telling visitors my opinion of the things that have changed, not for the better, at GeoCities since I became a Homesteader!Perhaps it could be perceived as suggestions for a more Homesteader-friendly GeoCities? Advertising & CookiesI'm not certain of the exact chronological order that these changes occurred, but, they certainly have happened... First was the site-wide adoption of Cookies. I'm not talking Cookies given just to people visiting Geocities, but, Cookies even on pages that only Homesteaders frequent, such as File Manager! Why does Geocities need to track the people who have sites with them? No reason that I can think of, except, perhaps, to inflate the count of 'visiters' that stop by at GeoCities, in order to impress their 'clients', advertisers and/or corporate partners!? The next bad step was no real fault of GeoCities, except for just not closing the doors to additional Free Pages. When GeoCities got their Millionth Homesteader, all of their file maintenance utilities became unreliable...at least more unreliable than they had been in my first 7 or 8 months since I'd joined. From FTP to File Manager, to entire Neighborhoods becoming unavailable, GeoCities is unstable and unpredictable for reliability! Thankfully, I've never been a paying member of GeoPlus, but, those people have more reason to be angry when their sites are inaccessible, or, they cannot update them! The latest and greatest GeoMisstep has been the recent site-wide testing of GeoStitials and GeoPops. The GeoStitial was a full-page ad that had a Meta tag to take visitors to the address/URL (Universal Resource Locator) that they had requested, 10 seconds after receiving the GeoStitial. Unfortunately, some browsers don't function with the Meta tag, so, they were virtually stopped from visitig the site/pages that they wanted. If people using such browsers simply tried to click on the link that was thoughtfully included, to reach their destination, that click simply reloaded/refreshed the GeoStitial...a never-ending circle of getting nowhere, except through clicking on the 'Back' button, in order to leave! Now, GeoCities is treating everyone who visits GeoCities, whether Homesteader or just plain visitor, to things called GeoPop ads. The coding for a GeoPop is a JavaScript, automatically attached to Homesteaders copyrighted pages. Whether adding coding to someone's copyrighted work constitutes a violation of that copyright is undetermined, however, some would argue that GeoCities can do practically anything with web pages that Homesteaders have voluntarily uploaded to GeoCities' server. The GeoPop basically puts up a smaller browser window, with the advertising inside of it. One of the bugs with the GeoPop is that it has a propensity to crash browsers, resulting in: ![[What a GeoPop Crash looks like!]](geopop.gif) Apparently, GeoCities, in conjunction with their advertisers, 'clients', or partners, have decided that the GeoPops are a permanent addition to GeoCities. The reason that I say that is because GeoCities has tied the GeoPops (or, rather, NOT having GeoPops upon one's site...) to their new GeoGuide. Basically, if a Homesteader has a GeoGuide on each of their pages, they shouldn't ever see a GeoGuide there...so far, that only works in theory. Adding the GeoGuide's coding is simple. All that one has to do is add to their pages, just beneath the BODY tag, as GeoCities wants it placed. As I see it, there are four problems with the new GeoGuide:
The Company![[The 1997 GeoCities' Office Staff]](geostaff.jpg) Photo: ©1997, GeoCities Above is the Christmas 1997 GeoCities' Staff photograph. After enlarging the photograph in PaintBrush, I tried counting them...although the picture is small, I counted about 50 heads. That's about 1/4 of GeoCities' actual staff, from my reckoning, if you count all of the Community Leaders (CLs), Liaisons, Co-Liaisons, Chat Monitors (CMs), etc., etc. ...for those of you that aren't familiar with GeoCities' "Official Volunteers". Basically, except for a handful of people in GeoCities' Offices, the "Official Volunteers" keep GeoCities running. If it weren't for a roster of Volunteers, GeoCities couldn't operate because actually staffing 200 people would be prohibitively expensive. What, exactly, do Geocities' "Official Volunteers" do? Well, in my opinion, they accomplish an incredible amount and diversity of things, sometimes at both emotional and financial cost to themselves. They help novice Homesteaders get their pages working properly, and, the way the Homesteaders want them; they cruise Block assignments looking for web pages that are missing required components, like the link back to GeoCities, and pages that violate the Content Guidelines, so that they may be repaired, and/or gotten rid of; they encourage Homesteaders and, nominate the good ones for inclusion in the A-List or Featured Pages. They also put forward a human face and touch for GeoCities, The Company, that, sometimes, doesn't even seem to have such warmth. GeoCities, The Company, seems to only care that the Homesteaders exist so that GeoCities gets visited because of the Homesteaders web page writing work. |
