The following has been circulated to county co-ordinators and may be
of use to some members of this list:
>About 2 weeeks ago we received a complaint from an Archives
>submitter that her materials were found on a genealogy subscription
>service:
www.familydiscovery.com
The submitter was able to do a little digging and found that
they were linking to her files housed on her server, but shrink-wrapped
inside a frame so it appears to be THEIR work. About 10 days ago, to
investigate this, I signed up with familydiscovery. To date, I have not
received a user id or password to get inside. The registered owners of
the web
site gave bogus telephone numbers in their registration. One number goes
to a recorded message line; the other to a carpet company. Some of the
e-mail addys on their web site bounce.
Standing on the outside and looking through the window, it
appears that several folks' web sites have been prize-mined:
http://www.familydiscovery.com/whatsnew.htm
The Storey Co., IA and the Washington Co., PA stuff seem to
come from USGenWeb sites. Some of the other IA and NC stuff seems to
come from non-USGW sites. None of the materials seem to be housed at
either rootsweb or usgennet.
I would suggest we all add the Java applet to bust out of the
shrink-wrapping:
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">
<!-- Hide script from old browsers
if (top.location !=self.location) {
top.location = self.location
}
// End hiding script from old browsers -->
</SCRIPT>
This needs to be inserted between <HTML> and <TITLE> on every
web page.
If you have text files on your web site, you will need to add a little
shrink wrapping of your own:
Create a blank web page -- use the tags <PRE> </PRE> ---
and paste your text file in between the <PRE> and the </PRE> -- and be
sure to add the Java applet.
If anyone out there is or has been a member of familydiscovery -- or has
been ripped off by them, I ["Joy Fisher" <jfisher(a)ucla.edu>] would like
to hear from you.
Permission is granted to forward this message.