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Links to a site called FictionMirror have been placed here but I have suspended their publication because the identified "advanced search" on the page brings up instead a series of pop-under ads for sports sites. I consider this technique a form of spam by deception.
This link is discussed in the WikiPedia article on FictionMania where it is implied but not stated that the FM TaskForce has approved FictionMirror. I would appreciate communication from some person knowledgeable about this but I will not pursue the information.
Hugs,
Erin
Comments
Hello. I am the webmaster of
Hello. I am the webmaster of FictionMirror. The pop-under ads were not placed there by me, they are put there automatically by my web host. The only ad I have is the small banner on top, which I have put there recently in order to pay for a future upgrade to premium hosting, which will remove the popups and give me more bandwidth to work with.
Not good enough
The pop-unders appear when one presses "advanced search" which does not do anything else. So your explanation is insufficient to convince me that it is not your own doing. There are plenty of free hosts around that do not do that sort of thing and, if you really have permission from FM TF to do this, any number of TG websites would have been pleased to give you space on their server, including me.
You always have the benefit of the doubt from me, so I'm willing to be convinced.
-- Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
I have removed all links to
I have removed all links to the advanced search page, since it causes unneeded controversy and is not complete yet.
Still not convinced
A link to a site very much like yours but with no ads at all last week caused a mini-flame war here and reverberated through other websites and mailing lists all last week. Since I've already removed your link, I'm going to leave it that way until I hear from someone who knows whether there is going to be a stink raised about this.
Believe me, I would LOVE for a site to be made available for searching the FM database and I applaud your effort. But I have to protect BC from this controversy. If you had not had the pop-under links, I would have left your link up till someone complained. But now the inertia of doubt is against me taking further action.
I'm still willing to believe you have permission to do this but I've been offered no evidence.
There's also the fact that the ad at the top of your page does not go to the site advertised but to a membership site aimed at writers.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
http://fictionmania.xeraweb.c
http://fictionmania.xeraweb.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3130
The person who gave me the index (which I converted to a database), allowed me to use it to create a site. Since they have access to the index, I believe that they're one of the Fictionmania group.
Also, the number of people using the site is growing pretty quickly, and most free hosts give very little bandwidth - this one stands out at 52 gigs. As soon as my banner pays for it, I will upgrade to a better plan.
http://byet.net/showthread.php?t=2181 <-- Proof of host's policy
Your belief is not evidence
In fact, that is the same source for the database information used by the person who put up the seach link last week with the same assumption that it came from FM. Apparently, that turns out not to be the case.
Seriously, if you have a good solution to this problem, one that is not going to cause venom and flames to be spewed, I've got tons of spare bandwidth. Processing cycles might be rare here but bandwidth I've got, 3300 gig, of which I seldom use more than 250 gig.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Is that hosting offer such a good one?
Not that I would personally know how much bandwidth you have or how up to date your servers are, but Is the offer of you hosting this site such a good one. The site would use a massive amount of bandwidth and I seem to recall you having already tried to host other people’s sites and in the end you had to shut that server down due to issues unknown to me… (I would know though because a very dear friend of mine was one of the people on that server, she was given 72 hours notice… The side effect of that was she didn’t have time enough to rebuild her site else where and lost over 90% of her members…)
That aside, if you've had problems with bandwidth and server crashes which I seem to recall you were at one time, is offering a site like this a home really a good idea?
I'm unaware of a story like this
Are you sure you're talking about me? Three days? I've shut down servers and asked people to leave them but it was after months of talk and repeated attempts at talk. One of the people using one of my servers was hosting other people, too, but I had no control of that. That server had to be taken down because of constantly being hacked into.
And I've never had problems with bandwidth, bandwidth is cheap. Server crashes, yes. But as it happens, I have a small server in Pittsburgh being used for nothing but DNS. I could host something on that with no interference with BCTS. Also, Bob has expressed willingness to host such a site and he has a couple of underused servers.
I wouldn't do it without assurances that it is okay with the FMTF, though.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Pittsburgh?
So THAT'S why my internet is so slow!!!! Sneaky Erin, very sneaky!!! LOL
Hugs
Hmm, odd.
Well, I guess it's simply my personal experience vs. your word on a site that you run and is filled with your adoring fans. I guess then I must just give you the benefit of the doubt.
Site Hosting and Mistaken Identity?
You might want to verify your information... I have offered hosting to many of the same people Erin has... You speak of no specific sites so it can't be verified or faught... It's almost like you are to be microsoft... Charging a company with copying source code, but refusing to state what code was stolen and from where...
It's entirely possible you are mistaken and maybe your fight should be directed @ Me?
-P/KAF
Fight?
Who said anything about a fight? And either way, I was not the person directly wronged. I am neglecting mentioning her name specifically for privacy issues, though I will say she has an saved e-mail giving her notice of the server, that her site was hosted on and was owned/run by BC, being shut down that was dated as being sent actually only 2 days prior to the date mentioned in the e-mail for the server to be shut down. She also later remembers receiving an e-mail mentioning bandwidth issues but can't seem to locate that one. She's been on BC for years, has posted stories here, etc., but has since pulled them all down I do believe for personal reasons, etc. I was simply bringing up said issues that have occurred in the past as they seemed somewhat relevant to the issue at hand: a site, actually a LARGE site as to the volume of content it has, being hosted upon one of her servers and using up her bandwidth.
Still no details I recognize or dates
You CAN PM me if you don't want to mention this in public. But blind accusations like this are not worth me trying to pursue.
-- Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
I will admit Fight was my
I will admit Fight was my word and not mentioned by you. I'm having a bad night and apologize and will shut up to regrain frm iserting my foot further down my throat.
-Sorry
-P/KAF
Timely warning
You seem to be saying that after months of talking about a problem that I should not give a last minute notice as to when a site is going to be taken down. A half dozen sites were removed from one of the BC servers about two years ago. They were using some obsolete BB software that was letting hackers attack the server. They were hosted on my server through an agreement with another user who I had given space to. I did not have direct approval of those sites.
The person I did approve became ill and could not be contacted reliably for weeks. Eventually, I disabled the problem sites after sending out more than one warning. I also saved all the data from those sites and I probably still have it somewhere. Most of the sites I disabled had no legitimate traffic, just hackers trying to use flaws in the software to get control of the server.
I don't remember hearing from anyone that I was causing them hardship by discontinuing a free service that turned out to be endangering my own sites. In fact, the lack of communication ended up being the main reason I had to terminate those sites.
-- Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Fine.
Ok, but let me ask you this after having read your description of the events: if you had all the data from all those sites, and you're such a gracious host, why did you not try to just send a mass e-mail using the stored contact information of the authors of those hosted sites explaining all that in detail? Or, were you expecting/assuming the person who became ill who was supposedly running it all off your server and became unreliably contactable to take care of it all knowing that these people knew it was a BC based server and hoped that it would not reflect badly upon you?
Also, I've described to you what happened to my friend... if you had gone through the same situation, can you blame her for not wanting to contact you? Or would you, like her, see what happened and feel like it was some underhanded slap to the face? Honestly. I know that if I were in such a situation, I'd be pretty pissed off and not want to associate with anyone of the site that closed my site down, be it on purpose or not, and only gave me a two or three day warning.
This is the issue at hand. I can understand that you have a lot on your plate, but you even admit it's been two years. Perfection cannot be expected of you, but if you are to reflect the title of the gracious host that everyone sees you as, shouldn't you have been a little more proactive?
And I would also like to say that I may be a little angry about this personally, and this post may seem quite a bit Caustic, to say the least, but I'm not openly just defacing your character for some personal agenda. this isn't slander, this is mentioning of facts, and the facts concerning how one may interpret the facts. I'm not calling you a doo-doo face or something else like that. this isn't some Kiddy Rant. I'm presenting this out here, and yes, I may be on the offensive, but in this case, after 2 years, one may call it "petty" for holding a "grude" for 2 years, or perhaps it is sanctioned to be a bit upset over such actions and perhaps a simple apology is in order.
Communication
I don't actually remember now exact situations. I did try several times to contact people and I offered apologies at the time, as I remember. I'll apologize again. I'm sorry I had to do that.
I spent time and effort working on those things, lots of time and effort. And only three people ever paid me anything for what I was doing, I think I got a total of about $105 in donations to BC. If your friend's site had been paid for on a commercial host with the things that were happening, she would have been no better off. I know because I have lost sites due to the same sort of thing happening on commercial shared hosts. And I got NO warning at all, just an email saying, "Your website has been terminated due to violation of Terms of Service."
As for mass mailing, that is pretty much what I tried to do but a lot of the contact info I had did not work. Most of those people had been working with Theresa who was back out of the hospital and did contact me and we worked to get her data off the machine. I didn't know most of her people and had not talked to most of them.
I can't do anything about a problem if I'm not told about the problem. You're telling me now and I STILL don't know who you're talking about because you won't say in public and you haven't tried to communicate with me privately. I'm right here and I've been right here for years. If someone needs to talk to me, I will listen.
This isn't trivial or petty. But I'm not losing any sleep over it because I did what I could in the situation and tried to make sure no one was hurt. Your tale of what happened does not match with my memory but I'm not surprised at that. It's been two years. I'm willing to apologize to whoever needs one.
And I'm sorry for what happened to your friend.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Especially since...
...you give no details so I can identify what the heck you are talking about. It's not a question of being on my site and with my fans around, it's a question of you making a statement and offering no support when questioned.
You can PM me if you don't want to air details in public. But you knew that, surely.
-- Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Did you ask the Fictionmania webmaster?
Talea is the only one of the FM Task Force who can give you permission to link to FM's story data base.
She can be contacted at [email protected]
Mr. Ram
Nobody allowed this
> allowed me to use it to create a site
that's a lie - and an impudence. No member of the Task Force allowed that, and nobody else is authorized to do this.
The webmaster is obviously well aware that (s)he is doing something illegal, since there is no name or mail address.
As long as this site is online access to fmstories is not possible.
Steffen
Ownership...
Since FM is descended from an IRC channel, it would seem that the only people who actually own the data are the authors themselves, who (with one prominent exception, who disagreed vehemently with at least one member of the task force) haven't weighed in on the issue.
The previous remote link used FM's bandwidth, which I agree was problematic in several ways, but a separate server seems like an entirely different issue.
IRC was typically hosted in a distributed manner, with "mirrors" all over the place, which contributed greatly to its robustness (despite a few design flaws) and adding a mirror sounds like a *huge* improvement to me, but what do I know?
I believe that an amicable arrangement is fully-compliant with IRC culture, and with the best of Web culture, and would prefer to see more co-operation and less snits, but again, that's just me.
Puddin'
----------------
Love does not cause suffering:
what causes it is the sense of
ownership, which is love's opposite.
--- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
P.S. I have anti-pop-up filters installed on my browser, and never read the log to see that they were there. Sorry about that. I should have looked and warned people.
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
IRC?
Nope, IR Blonde. ;-) I have no idea what an IRC is nor how it is germane to the subject. But anything that helps preserve the stories at FM for future readers has to be a good thing. I used to read TG/TS stories over on AOL, way back when we were considered a red-headed stepchild by pretty much everybody. Like the early sci-fi stories, many of the early TG/TS stories would be looked upon somewhat humorously by today's readers, but they represent the early steps our community took to reach out to each other. For that reason, I would greatly mourn FM's demise. Those stories need to be available to all, and archived widely so they won't be lost.
Yes, by all means, let us cooperate.
They know they can survive
IRC
Internet Relay Chat.
It was essentially a huge party line in which everyone talked at once, but one could subscribe to particular channels and ignore most of what was going on. There were problems, of course, as people started spamming, sending out large numbers of hateful messages, and messing with the system, which of course *never* happens on the modern Internet, and it was text-based, so one didn't receive pretty pictures other than by special arrangement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRC
That's a rather technical description that may well bore you to tears, but IRC is still around.
Puddin'
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
IRC... Fictionmania... BBS...
IRC is still around.... Stardust's chat is IRC based... Heck, I run a 5 server IRC network for GabyZone/TGFiction.Net... IRC is definitely not as big as it used to be, but there are a lot of us old-timers trying to get the noob's into the swing of things...
On a side note, I believe FictionMania originally was a BBS (Bulletin Board System) with a Fidonet/Usenet gateway that was used to archive stories and whatnot. I don't know the whole history because while BBS's aren't B4 My Time, I never found FM till the web... So I may be completely off base... I do know however that there is currently a FictionMania IRC channel that's used for file trading last I visited...
IRC has never been the same since the DDoS bots worked hard to bring down the BIG networks like EfNet, DalNet and Undernet.... All still exist but many servers are virtually empty...
-P/KAF
CyberBrats IRC - http://www.cyberbrats.net
Pop-Unders on other links
It's not just off of the Advanced page, the pop-under pages show up when using "Normal Search", Random Stories" "Oldest and Newest" and even " Multiple Category Search" - or to make it more simple - ALL the links have Pop-Unders!!!!
...and this is the reason I like this site
I just finished reading the dialogue and fully understand pop unders. I don't like them so I don't visit a lot of sites. I'm happy here and am glad we have a person like Erin minding the store.
Jill Micayla
May you have a wonderful today and a better tomorrow
Jill Micayla
Be kinder than necessary,Because everyone you meet
Is fighting some kind of battle.
Pop ups and unders
After the uproar, I went and tried it a couple of times. My settings appear to work, as I saw no evidence of any advertising. Yahoo has a blocker plus my other settings are set to block them also. Glad to know they appear to work right.
Also the nice thing
about using a PSP. No popups, no moving ads, no viruses- there's some good to be found in a browser barely compatible with anything.
As for the mirror, is it linked to a cached story list? I tried it, and what I searched for seemed to always either not be there or have missing parts.
Melanie E.
The site is based on a March
The site is based on a March 2008 index. There's not much I can do to improve that, since Fictionmania is down. However, I do plan to make a feature that automatically finds unindexed stories using patterns.
For example, if fmstories.com/storypart1.txt fmstories.com/storypart2.txt, and fmstories.com/storypart3.txt is in the database, it will check to see if fmstories.com/storypart4.txt exists.
It really sounds like...
... you're trying to do a good thing here. Thirteen thousand stories with no reliable way to index them for going on three months has been a big problem for the community, despite maybe half of those stories being available elsewhere. BC has only about half as many stories as FM but our story files are part of the database, not separate entities. If BC were down, it would really be down.
I really wish that someone from FM would step in here and speak a word to everyone's concerns.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
WWW on PSP...
Yeah, surfing the WWW on PSP may be nice for quite a few things... But it still denies you the ability to surf some specifically wonderful websites that aparently don't work on PSP :(
-Sigh-
-HuGgLeS-
-P/KAF/Sarcastic Little Brat ;P
TGFiction.Net = http://www.tgfiction.net
CyberBrats IRC = http://www.cyberbrats.net
GabyZone = http://www.gabyzone.com
Yeah...
and the memory limitations are pretty nasty at I think like 4Mb or less, but nothing's perfect, and for most of what I do it's fairly passable. Plus, I can put it in stasis to save my place in a story and carry it in my pocket, with a six hour battery life :)
PSP + Batt Life :)
Show Off! :P But then again, I do the same thing with my phone and don't need a wifi hotspot, so :P
It was not approved
It was not approved by the FM TaskFore, quite in the opposite (as I said already in another post).
The webmaster of FictionMirror did never reply to my mail telling him/her that she is not allowed to do this.
Steffen
Life is a banquet
According to Auntie Mame. But who are the poor suckers who are starving to death?
"Imagine books and music and movies being filtered and homogenized. Certified. Approved for consumption. People will be happy to give up most of their culture for the assurance that the tiny bit that comes through is safe and clean. White noise.â€- Chuck Palahniuk
Daniel, author of maid, whore, bimbo, and sissy free TG fiction since 2000
What the world needs is more geniuses with humility; there are so few of us left.- Oscar Levant