Warren,
The short version is that
Ancestry.com decided that they had
a right to cache each and every page of the whole English
speaking world that was remotely related to genealogy and
display it in such a way that you could not even tell which
URL the original was coming from. Thus far we have had 3
different statements from
Ancestry.com saying the material
is offline but they only took part of it offline. Even now
there are whole states still cached behind their frames but
none of the county home pages. They did give in and agree
they had no right to charge for it. They first had the
entire cached database of millions of pages linked to a new
link on their home page called the International
Biographical Database for paid subscribers only; but the
outcry from the entire genealogy world has at least made
them hide the cached pages a bit better. My personal site
with 5 gigs of data was completely cached originally but it
is no longer there in the original format. However, as for
USGenWeb sites hosted on Rootsweb, as well as a few other
servers we have found thus far, have been culled for pages
that they can still display without indicating where they
are from. They have only removed our logos and even then,
it is only the actual pictures that were removed because
they did not take the time to remove the links themselves. I
have 2 counties outside of North Carolina and I can still
access those because I did not put a robots.txt in the
directory which prohibited their bot from caching them.
However, the moment I put the robots.txt on 3 counties, they
locked me out of the accounts and thus far have not
responded to any of my questions about why they chose to do
so..
We only know of 2 people who have actually been locked out
of their county sites. The other gentleman is well known to
many because of his various distinct projects hosted on
Rootsweb. He did not use the same robots.txt file I did but
he did recode his pages to insert a breakout script so that
they could not be cached but only linked to. All his
accounts have also been locked.
Anyone who is using a Rootsweb account for any purpose has
agreed to allowed them to do this and they have decided they
will do it whether we wish them to or not. I personally
would not mind if I did not have so much material on my
county sites that was generously donated based on the
premise that it would never go into a commercial database.
By allowing that to happen, I would be the one responsible
for their capture of the copyrighted materials based on a
the ruling in a recent law suit involving Google. Since I
have denied them that right, I can no longer use their
accounts to host the counties in question.
Hope this gives you a brief summary. If you want to know
more, just write me and I will be happy to answer anything
that I can. It still seems to be in a state of flux based on
their repeated statements in attempt to calm the entire
genealogy world.
Nola
----- Original Message -----
From: "Warren T. Bagley" <wtbagley(a)nc.rr.com>
To: <ncgenweb-discuss(a)rootsweb.com>
Sent: Friday, August 31, 2007 4:48 PM
Subject: [NCGENWEB-DISCUSS] Complaining
I certainly don't know of what some of you have been
talking about. Many emails leave me a little short. How
about a better explanation of what you are talking about.
I "ain't" totally stupid, but I expect you have also left
others by the wayside.
Thanks,
Warren
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