Hosting Service Closes 3000 Blogs Without Notice

marmoset writes "Citing the high costs of running the free service, performance concerns, and health problems, Dave Winer closed down the weblogs.com hosting service without any prior notice. As many as 3000 sites are now inacessible, and the users who want to transfer their data elsewhere have to ask (politely) for it to be exported. As might be expected, reactions range from understanding to enraged. Netcraft has a report, too."

TOS

[BodyCount07]

The real question is whether or not this is allowed in the TOS. If it is, well than, that's how the cookie crumbles, users should have been making backups.

If it is not allowed by the TOS than users have a right to be outraged.

Backups

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you trust any hosting company to keep the only copy of your data, if it were all that important to you?

Backups?

[Insomnia]

You mean all those who have these all-important weblogs don't have any backups of that data anywhere else?

Newsflash...

[WIAKywbfatw]

When your data is on someone else's servers, and you don't have any of that data properly backed up, then you are completely at their mercy when it comes to being able to use it or losing it entirely. This is especially true when the service that they are supplying is being provided for free.

Umm...

[dotslashconfig]

So let me get this straight... He didn't know even 1 day in advance that rising costs and other technical/logistical difficulties were going to force him to shut down service? That seems rather ridiculous and is a huge oversight on his part. To not even warn people that he was having difficulties... it's mind boggling. I'm sure someone would have come to his aid, or at least tried to organize a fund to assist in maintaining service.

Honestly, though... to not see this coming even a few days in advance? That's very disappointing.

Re:TOS

[saihung]

Only in such a sick culture could the terms of a contract take precedence over common courtesy. It would've cost him so much to give people a couple of days to get their shit in order?

Audio recordings

[AirLace]

The most interesting thing is that Winer announced the withdrawal of service through a poorly recorded audio file. Could it be that he's been struck down with RSI?

Whatever the case, I think he could have shut down the service gracefully, perhaps handing it over to a friend or a third party rather than abruptly pulling the plug. But at the end of the day, he's only damaged his own reputation -- it's not the end of the world for anyone.

Re:Umm...

[EvanED]

If he was having problems already I'm not sure a mad rush of 3000 people trying to back up their data would have exactly helped...

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

before the winer-hating starts...

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember when Winer started the site. It was Userland released their blogging software a while back, before blogging was really popular. I thought it was mostly to show off the software and let people "get started". It was not meant to host high-traffic public sites.

Winer says that he will export the sites after July 1. I don't know why he insists "after July 1", or why he didn't say "I am closing them down in X days" but he's pretty stubborn sometimes.

So, I'm not really surprised. I personally wouldn't depend on a third party storing my site for free, without even a local backup.

Re:TOS

[EvanED]

"It would've cost him so much to give people a couple of days to get their shit in order?"

Actually, maybe. I don't know his hosting situation, but if even a quarter of the people had gone to back up their posts, that's a significant amount of extra traffic. Notice would have probably been have to be given out at least a week in advance to avoid a massive rush.

Re:TOS

[TeraCo]

Well, it's easy to talk about costs when they aren't YOUR costs to be paying, isn't it.

Re:Umm...

[dotslashconfig]

What I mean is... if he'd given people a little more time to examine the situation - even a week would have been sufficient - people who liked his service might have tried to set up a fund-raising activity of some variety. I'm sure his users wouldn't have minded contributing a dollar or two in order to continue service.

People just needed a small amount of time to prepare, even if they wouldn't have the chance to back up their data.

In my experience, people tend to react more favorably towards disappointing situations if they have fair warning. People are a little more understanding if they have the chance to react to this news, as opposed to suddenly just seeing their information disappear.

That's why "trading curbs" were implemented on the New York Stock Exchange. People needed time to react to news that could potentially cost them money/time. It's a lot easier to deal with losses if you either see them coming, or are given a fair chance to recover from drastic swings. (A little off-topic, but I think this relates).

Backups

[Anonymous Coward]

Never EVER trust some one else to do your backups.

To the poor idiots who have lost "4 years of data" -- you should have realized this was a very real posability. Even if it was due to hardware failure....Sadly, this was due to the expense of running a web site.

Re:before the winer-hating starts...

[Zibblsnrt]

Winer says that he will export the sites after July 1.

Provided people ask in a specific, formulaic manner which betrays no unhappiness at the decision. Power trip? Uhhyep.

-PS

Re:Umm...

[SuperDuperMan]

Ultimately the service was free. People who bitch about the quality of free service should ask themselves why anyone who offers them a free service should be obligated to provide them with a level of service they could expect from a pay service.

Re:Umm...got bandwidth cost?

[itallushrt]

Exactly. He wasn't going to alert 3000+ users to only have them suddenly spike his bandwidth cost for the month through the roof. Even with or without 95th percentile billing.

Re:Newsflash...

[FrYGuY101]

As a MINOR participant in one SF project, I'll gladly point out that I keep a local copy of the source. If SF went tits-up (God forbid), I'd be quite saddened, but I wouldn't blame SF if I also lost my copy of the source. It'd be MY damn fault for not taking precautions.

Re:before the winer-hating starts...

[hdparm]

There is also a link on Dave's home page - Doc Searls (one of the bloggers affected) provides a bit more info [weblogs.com]. If he understands, I am really at loss as to why /. readers who are not directly affected have to flame this guy.

Re:Not any more then normal traffic really..

[cbreaker]

Considering that the majority of the data is displayed on users' browsers, they could have shut down the sites but allowed the owners of the blogs to grab the data. It would probably have been less traffic in the few days before shutdown then normal traffic.

Re:TOS

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell, I'd bet that most of these people didn't even know who Mr. Winer was.

If they did, they probably would have known better than to trust him.

Certainly no one in the Mac world is missing that self-absorbed drama queen. Good riddance. (No, you're right, Dave -- Apple doesn't need a new OS core and how dare Steve Jobs not run the company to your specifications?)

Hmm...

[Slipped_Disk]

And THIS, ladies and gentlemen, is why I host MY little blog-like thing on MY OWN site, using MY OWN crappy software. That way I KNOW backups are getting done, and I KNOW when the machine will be down, and if something goes wrong I can fix it MY OWN DAMN SELF.

Sorry if I seem a little callous, but really how hard is it to write a few hundred lines of PHP for a simple online journal with comments? NOT VERY! And it runs on the same machine I use for all my other stuff (DNS, Mail, CVS) so it's not like I'm spending untold thousands extra each month, it really helps make the cost-benefit ratio of my server more tolerable.

Think about it.

Did a blog kill your mom or something?

[katsushiro]

Honestly, the amount of snarky comments along the lines of 'Oh, blogs suck anyway, who cares.', and 'It's all idiotic blabbing anyway.' are getting on my nerves. Really, no one thinks you're one of the cool kids now just because you think blogs are passe. Stop trying to be a post-ironic hipster type who's oh-so-tired of it all. Posting on Slashdot won't get you laid. Neither will having a blog, of course, but that's my point.

I don't understand the level of hostility against blogs. No one's putting a gun to your head and making you read them. I actually support efforts by Google and other search engines to separate blog results from regular webpage results. Sometimes I don't want to have my search results skewed by blogs, and sometimes I really want to know how the 'blogosphere' feels about a particular issue. But while that happens, just ignore them. If you hate them so much, don't read them. But, really, infantile attacks don't make you superior in any way to the bloggers.

I know most blogs are, indeed, just self-centered rambling, or 15 year old girls talking about their latest dream with N'Sync and a pony, but on the other hand, they're valid outlets for a lot of people to just vent, express themselves, and give their opinions on issues. If you don't want to hear those opinions, then just don't visit their blogs. It's that simple.

And yes, I do have a blog of my own, no, I'm not giving out the address here, since it's basically just a self-centered little website that's read by me and maybe 2 friends, and that's fine by me.

Re:TOS

[JPriest]

Yes, but that cost would likely be offset when people read that only the free accounts were nuked. Non-free accounts were not nuked, so many of the free users probably would have been willing to pay to upgrade their service in order to keep it.

Choice quotes from the wired article

[beforewisdom]

From: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,63856,00. htm

In an audio message posted late Monday explaining his reasons for the shutdown, Winer cited the financial costs of hosting the sites, technical difficulties in moving the blogs to a new server, stress and personal health issues as the reasons for the sudden shutdown.

Winer, who has offered free hosting to bloggers for the past four years, has promised to make exportable copies of blog contents available to the blogs' owners at their request. He says it will take at least two weeks to provide copies of the blogs' contents.

"I just did the best I could," said Winer, in his audio message. "This is not a company here ... this is a person. To expect company-type service ... that's just not going to happen."

The first reaction on reading the news is to assume the guy was being a dick in not giving notice when he saw this coming.

Reading the quotes from the article it may not be that cut and dried.

A single person doesn't donate his work to running a service for 4 years then just drop people for the hell of it.

The quotes above sound like he had other intense stuff going on in his life ......things with a higher priority....that forced him to put off dealing with this in a better manner.

Maybe people wouldn't be angry at him if he mentioned the details of these extenuating circumstances, but then again why should he publish the personal details of his life? I'm sure anyone here can imagine several situations to make a hobby project you run the last thing on your list of priorities: a significant death, loss of a job, being forced to move, 1 or more of other things called "life" etc.

BTW, I only heard the term "blog" within the last 2 years, yet one of the quotes from the article said this guy ran weblog for 4 years.

Is the term "blog" newer then this guy's service?

I used to "blog" before the term and the software. I just updated a personal website I had rather frequently.

Steve

Re:could it be.. no.

[cbreaker]

3,000 people is nothing compared to a Slashdot flood. The blogs are small. He could have easily shut it down to the general populace, and left it open only to the owners of the existing blogs. It wouldn't have been more traffic then normal.

Yes, it was free. No, you can't do anything about it. And yes, it was still and asshole thing to do.

To all saying users should backup their blogs...

[tlambert]

To all saying users should backup their blogs...

Exactly how are they supposed to do this?

A fundamental weakness in the blog paradigm is that there is CGI software between you and your raw data, in order to impose a style on it. This is particularly true of third party hosting, which provides cookie-cuter blogs through common software, where the only thing that differes from user to user is a few settings and their URL.

Backups usually only make sense if (1) you can get at the raw, preformatted data, and (2) that getting at that data will do you any good -- e.g. you will be able to externalize it the same way somewhere else.

At this point, blog-hosting service providers really don't have standards for their variable data, so even if you had a backup, it really wouldn't get your blog back up on the net, without a lot of work.

-- Terry

Re:Backups

[SanityInAnarchy]

In this case, suppose I don't actually own my own computer?

In general, suppose I'm renting storage space? Suppose I've got terabytes of data that I won't need for very long, but I need somewhere to store it NOW? Obviously I can't afford backups, and I have to trust someone else with my data.

It sucks but it happens

[wuice]

I remember the day when my Livejournal had been totally wiped. Emptied. Back to square one. I sat there dumbfounded, what had happened to my months of entries? I'm not the only one I've seen this happen to.. I guess all you can really do is move on. Losing data sucks.. Be more rigorous in backing up next time and hopefully it won't happen again.

I've lost unreplacable data a few times now (sometimes on my machine, sometimes on someone else's servers). I should have learned my lesson sooner. Even if it *shouldn't* happen, it does happen. Sucks facing hard immovable reality sometimes.

Money

[PsiPsiStar]

If money and stress were really the problem, why not sell the service to a company and then offer backups. If only a fraction of the people paid up ($15 for a year?) it would have been worth it and fewer people would have gotten pissed.

This guy can do what he wants, but he handled things badly.

You get what you pay for...

[coene]

... which in this case is... nothing :P

Seriously, why would you leave data on a free hosting service's servers? You can't count on them. If I use a Hotmail or Yahoo email account, I have to understand it could drop off the planet tomorrow.

It takes big ones to complain about a free service.

Re:To all saying users should backup their blogs..

[k4_pacific]

How 'bout after each post, go to the blog, then go to file->save as...

It will be HTML, but it could be restored fairly easily by opening the html file in a web browser and copying and pasting into a new blog's post page in another browser window.

It would be inconvenient, but not as hard as you make it out to be.

Anyway, visit my blog. There is a link in the sig. I try to write about interesting things like life on other planets and token-ring adapters rather than just posting the typical masturbatory grousing you find in most other blogs.

Re:Newsflash...

[pipingguy]

When your data is on someone else's servers, and you don't have any of that data properly backed up, then you are completely at their mercy when it comes to being able to use it or losing it entirely. This is especially true when the service that they are supplying is being provided for free.

What part of the above is so difficult to comprehend? Surely someone that has important writings or content also has it on their local hard drive, no? If it's been crawled, Google cache or the Wayback Machine might be able to recover some, but there's no sympathy for not backing-up stuff that's important. Then again, how many blogs are actually "important"?

Dave Winer

[redtail1]

For those of you with better things to do than follow weblog community matters, Dave Winer is a narcissistic asshole who will do almost anything to get attention including revising history, throwing temper tantrums, slamming other people (but later denying he did it) and taking his ball and going home. He jealously guards technologies he helped create and hinders any efforts to help them grow from pet projects into community standards because he doesn't want to lose the spotlight. Most people who know him have learned to ignore him because complaining about his petulant behavior is pointless.

There. Now you're up to speed.

Re:TOS

[squidinkcalligraphy]

And it's even easier to talk about costs when you are part of the force that is increasing them as we speak: I refer to the slashdot effect.

Re:Newsflash...

[Huogo]

I pay for hosting, and I still do backups at least once/week (mainly for the database backups). Anyone who keeps anything on the 'net should know that its an unstable place, and thing can dissapear at a moment's notice. I don't trust anything to be kept securely to the web, and no one else should either.

Dedication and Sorrow

[Tojosan]

That's what I heard in his voice. I wasn't a user so I'm not going to say I understand the frustration of the bloggers but I'm just not seeing the need to attack this guy or his efforts.

This is also a loss not to just the bloggers but the scores of folks who read those blogs. TO be honest it sounds like a loss to him also.

Let us give him the benefit of the doubt and wish him well.

Tojo

Re:Umm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Human decency in light of the massive number of man hours he took responsibility for? Basic common courtesy? I keep forgeting that where expenditures and commerce are involved all of this is considered irrelevant. Nice society you're positing there.

Re:Backups

[el-spectre]

Well, in that case you shoulda kept it on floppies or something.

Losing stuff w/o backups sucks. We've all been there. Still, if you know better and don't do it, you're not gonna get much love from slashdot.

Health issues?!

[YouHaveSnail]

I'm concerned to hear that Dave Winer is suffering from health problems. Whatever you think of him and his various endeavors, Dave has been incredibly influential in the Macintosh software and Internet development communities for about as long as I can remember. Incredibly productive, too. I won't try to list all the stuff he's done [editthispage.com], but we've all used the fruits of his labor. And he hasn't filed a single patent for any of it.

So screw the blogs and give Dave a break. If there's anyone out there who has earned a bit of understanding, Dave's the guy.

Speedy recovery to you, Dave.

Re:Umm...

[cHiphead]

its like setting up a community service to help people store books, then one day without notice saying 'fuck you all, ive lost too much money on this' and chaining the doors and openly telling people they have to kiss your ass and not ever complain if they want you to bring their books outside for them. at a future date. maybe. because your an asshole.

that about sums it all up, and i even read all articles/blogs/links/bullshit.

Re:Thankfully not LiveJournal

[josh3736]

Doesn't an N Sync CD cost about $25?

...about, but you have to consider two factors:

1. This is the age group most inclined to get anything and everything they can off Kazaa. Teens have a very limited cashflow and $25 not spent on a CD/website/whatever is a week's worth of food.
2. Teens don't have credit cards. If they want to buy something off the web, they have to get a parent's card. This is usually hard or impossible.

So, they have to go for the free hosting. Of course, being greedy bastards, they'll whine and bitch for a week.

Re:Newsflash...

[LostCluster]

Anything on a web server is most likely on a hard disk... And hard disks are considered stable because their data doesn't disappear when the computer is powered down or reboots, but they don't last forever. All HDs have moving parts, and eventually some part of that drive will fail physically making your data nearly inaccessable. It's not a question of if but when. It will happen. Expect it to happen about 4-5 years after the drive first put into service. You should see this coming, not be caught unexpectedly by it.

There are no paid accounts

[Wesley Felter]

Dave Winer says "I don't want to start a site hosting business." As far as I can tell, there is no way to "upgrade" to keep a weblogs.com site; the best you could do is move to a different provider.

Disproportionate much?

[Complicity]

From the 'enraged' link:

Last night was a 9/11 of sorts for the weblogs.com bloggers.

Or entirely not like that at all.

Why we hate blogs

[SmallFurryCreature]

The web is a wonderfull things in wich countless bits of information are there to be found. Except it is getting harder and harder to find them. I can easily mentally filter out the fake link sites from google results. Porn is easy too. Shopping sites I learned to regonize and avoid as well. But blogs are harder because there are so many of them and the sentences shown by google actually seem to relate to the subject I am searching for.

Personal pages with no content of intrest to anyone have been around since the early days of the web. However they existed in their own little corner and were rarely found by search engines. Blogs because of the incestious linking to each other are found and are just another chunk of noise getting in the way.

Not that I hate blogs. It is just, ugh. I thought I found the information I wanted and instead I am on some whiners site. What a waste of time and bandwidth.

Now if only google could filter out blogs. Then all the personal sites would go back to their own little corner of the net and I wouldn't know anything about them. Of course if this is done then a lot of bloggers would whine because they would miss the accidental visits and see that in reality nobody wants to read about their thoughts. You gotta be intrestting to have something intrestting to say and most people simply are not.

Re:Dave Winer

[Anonymous Coward]

That's about an accurate, concise summary of Dave Winer as I have ever heard. If this drops below +5 at any point, please mod back up again.

Don't take our words for it, Google "Dave Winer" asshole [google.com] and read all eight hundred hits.

Re:TOS

[_KiTA_]

Obviously you're new to this whole intra-web thing.

People don't pay for stuff they get for free. If he had announced that he was closing free accounts, they would have slammed him HARD while they backed up their stuff, then ran off and found a new free host to mooch off of and left him high and dry with an outrageous bandiwdth bill.

You think he wasn't pushing them to try and get them to sign up for pay accounts already? The number one rule of the internet -- users are absolute resourch leeching mooches.

Run your own! It's that simple!

[shrewmy]

No, really. I bought a computer for $110 from Computer Renaisance that runs linux with no problem. Installing apache with perl was nothing using apt-get, and Greymatter took probably like an hour to get working. And that was my first time ever doing anything outside of "THIS IS MY COOL HOMEPAGE! THIS IS A TREE (picture of a tree) IF YOU CLICK IT YOU CAN EMAIL ME!!!" websites really. And most of the bloggers are ultra cool anti-microsoft people aren't they?

And if you have a blog thats popular enough for you to get enough traffic for your cable provider to get mad, wouldn't you already be on a paid host anyway?

Re:Umm...

[thedillybar]

He didn't know even 1 day in advance that rising costs...

If he would've known 1 day ago, he probably would've shut the service down 1 day ago.

It's not a matter of when he found out; it was a matter of saving his ass as soon as he did. Who can blame him?

New URLs Suck

[gbulmash]

So say someone has backed up everything and moves it somewhere else, how do their readers find them? More to the point, how do they find their readers??

March 1997, one of my little weekly columns (didn't call them "blogs" back then) gets a mention in Us. Unfortunately I'd been hosting it in donated /~username space, and right after the magazine puts the blurb to bed, the owners of the bookstore hosting my site decide they don't want to run a server anymore.

No warning, no forwarding, no nothing. I have everything backed up, so I register a domain, get hosting, and my site's back online within a few days... only at another address. I'm running around trying to update my entries at all the major search engines, posting to appropriate newsgroups, just trying to get the word out that my columns had moved.

Then Us comes out, glowing little blurb recommending my column... and the *old* URL. My first major national press and no one can find me.

That is the most insidious part of what Winer has done. He has separated all those bloggers from their readers, leaving them no way to leave a forwarding address. Anyone who doesn't backup their content takes their chances, but how do you backup your audience?

- Greg

Here's The Bottom Line, Morons

[Master of Transhuman]

Winer offered to host this stuff for free. He OFFERED (and to be fair, actually did it.)

People took him up on it (braindead though that might be since it should have been obvious to him and them it couldn't go on forever.)

Then he shuts it down WITH NO PRIOR NOTICE.

At best, that makes him an asshole (unless it was literally an emergency that prevented him from notifying anyone at all. Was that the case? Doesn't say so.) At worst, it makes him a major asshole.

Now the morons on /. can self-righteously complain that the people pissed off are "just whiners" - which makes the morons on /. "just whiners" by the same logic - they're whining about someone else's perfectly justified behavior.

Bottom line: You get what you pay for (sometimes) - and you never get what you don't pay for (usually).

Which doesn't justify being an asshole - always.

Being right justifies being an asshole - as I demonstrate here.

The funny thing about that to me...

[SuperKendall]

That seems to be a pretty common opinion of Dave. yet countless people decided it was a good idea to host their blog on a site operated by what would seem to be, by accounts like this, a madman!! Why on earth would you not expect your blog to just vanish someday, or have your words of wisdom turned into latin or something? Why would you host a blog there at all?

If the answer starts with "well, it was free..." then you get everything you deserve. I have plenty of my own "Well, it was {free,cheap}" experiences and although I grumbled about it a little in the end I could only blame my own human nature for trying to get something for nothing.

Come on

[SuperKendall]

I notice you posted that AC. Is that because you can't really put belief in your own words?

I don't care how much you try to explain the quote away as "metaphor", it's simply not appropriate to craft a metaphor for information loss from real people dying, especially in large numbers in a tragic manner. That's just plain rude and shows a lack of respect for those dead and the families still here. I imagine you could call up one of the "silenced" bloggers on the phone or even find some of them blogging elsewher eon the same day. Compare and contrast with a wife or child or husband who will never see a loved one again. Oh, you can't.

a lesson for givers...

[yow2000]

This reaction is a lesson for anyone thinking of giving anything away for free.

Responsibilities come with giving a gift, so that the giver is no longer free, but instead also gives away some of their own freedom, and is bound by the recipients to give them more.

Do these responsibilities really come with giving a gift? I'm not sure.

But look at the reaction.

Re:Come on

[BenjyD]

Come down off that bloody high horse. People use terrible things as metaphors - does saying "That was his Waterloo" show lack of respect for the thousands of soldiers who died? Does refering to the start of a major project as D-Day hurt veterans who were there? "It's like the Somme out there" - clearly, there aren't really thousands of British troops being mown down by German machine guns, but I doubt anyone would be offended.
Bloody americans take everything so damn seriously.

Re:Wired article

[Moraelin]

No offense taken. I'm a programmer, and half the people I see in this line of work are incompetent burger-flippers. Who only got hired because some "smart" beancounter thought he's cleverly saving money by hiring the cheapest monkeys. Except they have mental trouble even tying their shoelaces, forwarding emails or cutting and pasting.

(True story, and I swear to God I'm not making it up: every month I have to clean up my overflowing inbox at work, because some "programmer" mailed me a 24 bit full-screen screenshot to show me an error message displayed in telnet, or in whatever log viewer they were using. It takes work to teach them to copy and past that error message. What took the cake, though, was seeing an attached 24 bit full-screen screenshot of... an email in Outlook. Poor man's substitute for "forward".)

I would, however, disaggree with the assessment that even these are "just above" field service and helpdesk. You haven't seen the service and helpdesk, then. _Some_ of those make the "programmers" above look like brilliant geniuses.

The proper IT people here gave us PCs with Matrox drivers installed... and a Nvidia card. And the wrong IDE drivers. Anything except installing from the CD with the backed-up standard NT4 config is _miles_ over their head.

If you call them because your Outlook '97 (corporate standard, you see) crapped and now throws an error message on startup, as happened to a couple of co-workers, they'll want to format the HDD and reinstall that holy standard CD.

I swear to God I'm not making it up.

So basically, yeah, I'm with you there. Just because someone's job says "programmer", doesn't automatically mean that they can actually program or administer a computer. Or what a backup is.

Don't get me wrong. I also do know a whole bunch of good competent programmers. But also about 3 times as many whose only merit was being shameless enough to lie to an incompetent HR droid.

Re:Dave Winer

[Anonymous Coward]

So this Winer guy never did anything good then? So why are people talking about him?

Oh wait, Winer really gets attention by creating things for people, doesn't he. What did you ever create for 3,000 people, redtail1?

Re:TOS

[tf23]

Morally, if the guy is really dealing with personal illness, I feel for him, I have dealt with illness in my family and myself and that sucks - but it doesn't excuse screwing over 3000 people.


That's bullshit. If the guy's sick, the guy's sick. Simple as that. What he provided for people was/is for _free_. If they didn't have enough common sense to backup their own data and keep copies of stories they posted, it's their own fault.

But railing on the guy because he's sick and can't provide the quality free service that he did for a time (years? I don't know) seems extremely rude.

It's not like you've got the majority of these 3k people volunteering to come to his house and help him out for a few months to hopefully get over this crisis, no?

I'll agree with you that it could have been handled differently. Very differently infact - could have been better, could be worse (I imagine him pulling the powercord on the box and mumbling like cartman "screw you all") heh

Re:Why we hate blogs

[katsushiro]

I actually agree with you on this. On my original post I said I supported efforts by Google to filter blog results, after all. The thing is, blogs *can* be a valid source of information. I actually get a decent amount of my tech news from this blog-like site, you might have heard of it, Slashdot? :)

My point is, sometimes you *want* to know what's being written in blogs about Subject X.. and sometimes you don't. I agree that it would be nice for Google to have a 'Weblogs' tab that you could turn on and off. As for the people who would whine, hey, let 'em. That's part of what blogs are for, to whine to your heart's content. If the 'Blog Tab' is turned on in Google, you won't have to hear their whining anyway.

As for the 'incestious linking', I really don't see the problem with it.. Some of the best blogs out there are actually riddled with hyperlinks to a plethora of resources about whatever they're talking about, be they other blogs or regular pages. That's fine. Hell, that's freakin' *great*. It's exactly *why* the Web was designed with hyperlinking in mind. So that as you write you could link any part of your text to additional or related information elswhere in the web. It's not the blog writer's fault for doing exactly what the web protocols allow them to do. If doing this skews search results on a search engine like google because of the algorithm Google chose to rank their webpages, then it's Google's choice and responsibility to adapt to it and either change their algorithm or filter out the 'offending' sites.

Whether you like them or not, blogs are a fairly natural outgrowth of the Net's capabilities. As many here often say about any changes that affect other companies: adapt or die. Find a way to filter blogs from search results, and provide that option to those users who want it, or wait until someone else does it and watch them get your users.

Re:My guess at what happened

[Safety Cap]

Of course, that doesn't explain why he'd use an audio message to get the word out.

He explains in his audio that 'people don't read long essays', implying that they'll listen to some guy rambling on about his life story, insterspaced with coughs and---woe is me!---sniffles. Poor Dave, he obviously doesn't understand people (quick show of hands: which is faster to go through, email or voicemail? I thought so.)

If he had only written down his thoughts, then I would have bothered reading them, instead of cutting off his cute diatribe after a few minutes. I can read much faster than he can say "um, ... well, ... um ... "

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[account_deleted]

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Re:TOS

[Havokmon]

It depends on how much effort was involved, not just to export the data and import it somewhere (performing whatever conversion is required) but to communicate the new URL to everyone.

A modest fee would most likely have been paid, especially if new functionality came with pay accounts. Look at Livejournal - you can sign up for free, but paying users get more features. In fact Slashdot could learn a lot from Livejournal.

I run a free/paid email service - vfemail.net. You're welcome to monitor the main page and watch the number of free subscribers vs paid subscribers, but the paid users are pretty steady at 28 - while the number of free signups has just crossed the 10,000 mark :/.

People are cheap. If it wasn't for Google ads, I'd be dead in the water.

Re:A Little Perspective...

[silicon not in the v]

I think people may have missed the significant point of how this happened. They wouldn't have sent out a notice about impending closure from Userland because they weren't planning to close them at that point. Dave was planning to migrate them and keep them going. It was only after they had been moved that it was discovered how he had underestimated the amount of server power needed. The new home couldn't handle running them, much less the load it would have been hit with if everyone had been notified and started backing up their sites. It was unfortunate, but at least he's setting up a way for people to get their content back. I can't believe people are so upset about losing access to their hobby for a couple weeks. It's a hobby someone else pays for, too.